My partners Josep Martorell and Oriol Bohigas and myself began working together I think it was in 62. They'd been in practice ten years before. They'd met when they were at secondary school together. I first met them in 56 one summer holidays that I was in Barcelona. I liked them very much; saw the work they were doing. So as soon as I qualified, I went to Barcelona for a year's experience away from England, the English scene, and worked with them and other architects. When I was leaving after about a year they asked me to stay on, I stayed on, and then I was going to leave again and they asked me to stay on and join them in a partnership. And I must say work in Barcelona is extremely stimulating though frustrating at times: stimulating in the fact that you can really get things done because of the small industry in Barcelona. You're able to get to the point of design with the manufacturer or the little workshop round the corner who's doing the metalwork, or the carpenter, and things like that. It was really quite a fresh approach to design instead of a sort of catalogue design I'd been in contact with, or used to, in London.

This shows a building of ours for dwellings for a co-operative society in Meridiana. This was designed in 59 and built over several years till 65. First it was just one slice of this building with a single staircase and was so successful that the co-operative people began buying up the sites next door and the building got larger and larger. Now the Meridiana is a sort of urban motorway that digs into the city in rather a merciless way. On either side there are these huge blocks of flats rather anonymous, deadpan facades of monotonous windows. And here we tried to give a personality to the building by designing the facade somewhat independent to the plan. Each window juts out of the facade, the south part of the bay window, glazed, facing away from the sun of the afternoon which is the worst sun in Spain.