What do you consider to be your greatest professional achievement?

Working with my partner, Chris Wise, to keep our office focused on the necessity for craftsmanship and spatial delight in our projects.

What is the most fulfilling part of your job?

Exceeding a client's expectations. Walking through a completed project, or even a project under construction, and taking in how our collaboration brought us to a mutual accomplishment.

What are the biggest challenges facing designers today?

It's hard to find the time needed within project budgets and schedules to design something lasting and significant.

What advice would you give to design students or those just starting out?

Learn to draw and think with a pencil in your hand, not a mouse and keyboard.

What is the best thing you've learned in the past 10 years?

The fundamental elements that allow buildings to be meaningful are free of charge and found in nature. Natural light costs nothing but is the most significant element in our work.

What do you find the be the most exhilarating interior space you have ever been in?

The entry hall of Michelangelo's Laurentian Library (Library of San Lorenzo) in Florence. It's got an amazing sense of scale.

What do you consider to be the worst invention of the last 100 years?

Air Conditioning:As comfortable as it makes us, it allows architects to be lazy in the conception of buildings. We look at buildings designed before the advent of air conditioning;they have an honesty of composition and relationship to their context, which comes from the need for comfort.

What inspired your career choices?

I wanted to be an architect since I was six. I wanted also to be a professional baseball player, but I found architecture to be a more realistic path.

If you could have selected another career, what might you have been?

A professional baseball player

What would you like to leave as your legacy?

Buildings that will last for the next 2,000 years. Like Rome, we also make a lot of our projects out of concrete.

How do you foresee the future of design changing?

I would like to see designers focused on creating cost-effective shelter solutions for a growing world population.