We work in one big room; we don't have separate offices, so that's really the way we work best. In a way we're like a family, so you have absolutely no privacy. So if anything bad happens to you, everybody knows. But that's good because people are there in a very supportive way. And I think that's the way I feel most comfortable. I can't imagine sitting in a room by myself. I love to read. I live, in many ways, to read. That's another way I get my inspiration.

Things that are immediate, like reading M.F.K. Fisher when she writes about food. I love the way she writes about small experiences but makes them so powerful. She wrote this wonderful thing about when she was in France and she was very, very poor, what she would do was spread a newspaper over a radiator, then put oranges on the clean newspaper, and wait. And the orange skin would turn tight and dry from the radiator, and she would take each section and put it in her mouth and crunch through the skin, and then have the juice of the orange. In a certain way, it's very important to the way I think about architecture. That sense of tactility, and that's why we're so interested in materials, and the sense of the immediate sensual, and through the sensual, achieving an emotional experience.

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