“Princeton University's campus environment presents unique challenges a...” — Steven Holl Quote

Princeton University's campus environment presents unique challenges and opportunities for architecture to act as a social condenser.

For me, the excitement in architecture revolves around the idea and the phenomenon of the experience of that idea. Residences offer almost immediate gratification. You can shape space, light, and materials to a degree that you sometimes can't in larger projects.

My studio cube is an experiment in solar heating and design. The south wall is covered with glass planks that collect and distribute heat naturally to my work studio on the second level.

I choose work that is hard to pull off. And it's scary how things can go wrong. But if there's no risk involved, it's not challenging. A good idea will survive any process.

Form follows function.

Half of architecture students are women, and you see respected, established female architects all the time.

If I want to make people moved or cry in a film, I figure out what the room looks like, what the people are wearing, what time of day it is, what the light is, how to photograph it, where to put the camera. It involves optics and costume design and set design and architecture.

A year before I met Mark Brydon - he was the one I used to make all the music with in Moloko - I was living in Sheffield with a guy who was studying architecture. I used to go to his college and crash the lectures there. I had enrolled to do a fine art course, but then I met Mark, and we signed a record deal instead.