“I like to be surrounded by books. My wife Evelyn has a Ph.D. in comparative lite…” — David Chipperfield

In Britain, we've tended to replace the kind of architectural culture valued in much of Europe with an in-flight magazine lifestyle - all branding, marketing and 'accessibility', a word that usually means dumbing-down.

The quality of the Neues Museum's construction is extraordinary even by German standards, and people can smell that quality. The concept would not have been so convincing without it.

When the Americans are behind you, they're behind you 100%, and this gives you real confidence as an architect. They expect you to lead a building project - to make the kind of big and costly decisions that, in Britain, have been handed over to project managers and cost-cutters.

Most architects work in studios largely divorced from academia, as if ideas, criticism and historical research were irrelevant.