Well, I've never forgotten, when I was a student, going over to Paris and seeing the Pavillon Suisse, the students' hostel, which Corbusier built around about 1930 - 32. It made a tremendous impact on me. I mean, it seemed a sort of sensible economic solution. It had an unarguable clarity, standing as it did on great pilotis, with the landscape freed underneath it, what he called the espace libre sous la maison. There were no streets in his vision, and he always insisted that this building exemplified his image of a utopian city, in fact, the Ville Radieuse. It was a building which encapsulated all the turmoil, the excitement, the polemics, and the innovations of the machine aesthetic. And he brought them, for a moment, into tensed control, into a taut and exact expression. And in fact, it really did become a laboratory for the international urban program, and blocks on sticks went up all over the world.

By the fifties, I really rejected this utopian ideal, mostly because it lacked any sense of continuity with historical surroundings, and cities seemed to me to require complex relationships both in time, in space, and in closure, and this particular view of London at the King's Reach with the National Theatre on the right and St. Paul's in the distance gives some indication of the complexity and richness of what a city is about, and it also indicates a principal theme that I've been concerned with over many years, which is to look at architecture as an extension of bits of the city, bits of the existing city, or even look at architecture as bits of landscape, and I regard my architecture as an extension either of city or of landscape, and in the case of landscape, sometimes even becoming a metaphor for landscape, as you will see later.