Elizabeth Diller

I never thought I was going to be an architect in the conventional sense.

In a progressively privatised city, the defence of public space, the production of new public space, and saving what is public really for the public is very important.

My mother and father had been through the Holocaust. The family was wiped out. I grew up never knowing aunts, uncles, or grandparents.

I cannot read on a Kindle. I love the physical experience of holding a book, cracking it open, and the process of making the right half weigh less than the left half. I only read hardcover books because I like the resistance and the presence on a bookshelf.

I can't live without my 15-inch MacBook Pro. I drag it everywhere I go. I love having a big screen with me at all times, especially in transit.

We like to take impossible things and actually make them happen.

I think idiosyncrasy is great.

In the 1970s, New York was known as a place of great artistic production. Slowly, my city went from a place of production to a place of consumption.

As a kid, I imagined being an artist.

I can't imagine having a spouse who is not an architect. It's hard to put myself in the shoes of other couples where each partner brings totally different things from their day to the table.

The public brings our buildings to life, and we try to choreograph a lot of things, but our most successful work functions in unanticipated ways. Like the Blur Building. When little kids got in there, they cried or laughed or ran around. And no matter how much theory we put on top of it, it didn't matter: it worked.

I hate digital calendars, so I use pen and paper or the palm of my hand for my daily schedule. I get much more satisfaction out of physically crossing things out than deleting.

In my thesis, I made an intellectual exercise out of creating a pair of buildings that were a repeat but slightly different - dissonant things make me uncomfortable.

I believe in planning logics where you have neighbourhoods, and you don't just do one building at a time.

Architects and food at a construction site equals indigestion. We're always looking for details that haven't been executed correctly.

Many tools are indispensable for my work, from a utility knife to parametric-modeling software, like Digital Project. But it's important not to confuse the tool for the content, as some designers under 30 do.

Architects typically inherit programmes or sites. We maybe twist the programme a little bit, bring our own invention into it, and we feel perfectly happy when we walk away. It doesn't feel like quite enough.

I have a real survivor's instinct.

We try to make buildings last long and be resilient but also be not so idiosyncratic that they can't change.

Being a New Yorker and someone that goes to MoMA as a patron, I want it to be good.