All my public building projects I got these through open competitions and this Niigata project I won the competition in 1993. We did loads of research about the site of course and also the city, the town and then we will start doing the design but that is a secondary thing.

So for this particular project the site was enormous it was a very big site, so we spent loads of time thinking about the landscape and there was already existing buildings, old building already music hall, public building already and for thinking about a new project coming into the site was not just about thinking about new building, it's about thinking how the landscape would connect all these existing buildings together, so it was more about a landscape project and designing the building came afterwards.