For doing this Fangshan Tangshan museum, I got an email from a friend and a Chinese architect living in Beijing who was from Nanjing, and he introduced me this competition, and asked me if I would like to do this competition together with him, and I agreed to do that. After that we started to work together. I worked and I sent him the documents, but I went there on this site for the first time before starting the project.

It's always important for me to go on site, and to understand what are the conditions, what is the context, and to feel if the client has something to say. And it is not so easy, especially with Chinese, especially when you are surrounded by people only speaking Chinese, and not any English or French. So only my friend architect was speaking, translating to me in English. So I came to the site, and the site is one hour drive from Nanjing, and it's a natural, it was a natural site at this time, it was a kind of mountain. Tangshan was a little city, a little new development of a city, on the other side of the mountain. And we went on the site, and the site is very particular, because this is a place where in a cave they discovered the bones of two humans, of two pre-humans, from the Neolithic, the first homo erectus; that has been designed as the first homo erectus.