On Monday, the 60-person shop was named chief architect of billionaire Eli Broad's $80 million-plus art museum in downtown Los Angeles, beating out a collaboration by starchitects Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry. The commission came just two months after the boutique was chosen to design an arts and film center for the University of California in Berkeley.

DS+R had a dizzying 2009 as well, completing two high-profile projects in New York: the High Line elevated park, which was created from a long-abandoned railway line, and the redesign of Alice Tully Hall in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

The studio's partners--Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, who founded it in 1979, and Charles Renfro, who joined in 1997--may busy again in 2011. DS+R, which got its first big assignment with the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, which opened in 2006, is completing a museum on Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana beach and a media studio in Abu Dhabi. It is also in the running for three projects, including a factory in China. (Yes, that's right, a factory.)

The firm's payroll has grown from 25 six years ago, with plans to expand at least another 15 percent next year. Revenue should surge 150% this year. "We have to wonder that if there wasn't a building bust, would we be winning even more?" Renfro says. "We're thankful that we are bucking the trend. We're not getting rich, nor are we starving."

I caught up with Renfro, 46, as he took a train from his office on Tuesday. Here's an edited transcript of what else he had to say:

Q: How do you explain your winning streak?

A: The obvious answer is that we finally created several major commissions and people have heard of us and they hadn't before. Not until the last four years have we worked on complex jobs and proven that we could pull them off.

Q: The firm has been around more than 30 years, though. Is this an example of perseverance? Or is it just good luck?

A: I wish I could provide you with a silver-bullet answer, but I think it's a combination of all that. I also think our approach toward building and design is much more sympathetic to the economy. It's no longer the go-go '90s or even the 2000s. We're operating at the crossroads of making an icon and a very thoughtful response to clients' problems.

Q: Is it harder to do architecture in 2010?

A: It's probably harder for some people. There are many architects who are used to working on high-profile jobs, making iconic architecture. I think you will find them getting fewer commissions in this day and age. Maybe we're reaping the benefit of the downturn in this way. It's not harder for us.

Q: How would you describe the firm's design philosophy?

A: We take our inspiration from the context of the project. Having said that, we're very interested in pushing the limit of technology, of form-making, of structure.

Q: Has it become a challenge to manage the firm as it has grown so fast?

A: It goes without saying that anytime there's a quick jump in the staff of any business, there will be growing pains. We operate like a family. I think we're going to continue to operate on a similar manner.

Q: What would advice would you give to a student who is thinking of becoming an architect?

A: Go into law.

Q: And if he doesn't listen?

A: There are many other kinds of outlets that have become available to architects, from making shows to getting into museum and exhibit design to getting into writing online. Hope is not lost. The money is down, however. We were never a well-paid profession, much to a lot of other people's surprise. Definitely, there's less money out there to build buidlings. So we all have to be more creative.

Thomas gave me his pitch after flying from Illumitex's HQ in Austin, Texas. First of all, he says, the company's products are better than lots of the other new stuff out there. Competitors typically array their light-emitting diodes on disks. Illumitex places them in squares or rectangles to better illuminates all points of such common surfaces as billboards, parking lots or office interiors.

Second, the market is so new and fast growing that makers of commercial lighting fixtures haven't become married to their suppliers, giving everyone a fighting chance.

I found his third argument the most persuasive--Illumitex's investors. Since Thomas, a mechanical engineer by training, cofounded the company with chief scientist Dung Duong and Paul Winberg, its engineering vice president, Illumitex has raised $22 million from venture capitalists, led by New Enterprise Associates. Among others: DFJ Mercury and Applied Ventures, which is Applied Materials' in-house VC fund.

VCs aren't oracles, of course. But NEA has backed more than 650 startups since it began in 1978, and boasts that two-thirds have been acquired or gone public, including 3Com and Tivo. A sponsor like that suggests that Illumitex may have a chance.

When Groupon was launched in Chicago in November 2008, the seven employees were "just a bunch of rascals." They included one twentysomething guy who, though "supersmart," had so little gumption that Mason thought he'd end up working at Shoney's when he was 45. But given responsibility for a specific area, the guy flourished and now manages a staff of 65.

Mason also gave a shoutout to Eric Lefkofksy as the outsider most responsible for Groupon's success. Lefkofsky is a Chicago-based serial entrepreneur who, though his Lightbank venture capital firm, was Mason's original backer and adviser.

Groupon is en fuego. It is up to 11 million subscribers, offering group coupons for restaurants and retailers in 160 cities in 22 countries. In its 20 months, Mason said, the site has saved customers $300 million with its daily deals.

It also has its own pilot fish, according to this post on WiseBread. Say you can't use your Groupon discount or you think it's worth more than you paid, you can sell it on sites such as CoupRecoup and DealsGoRound.

The discussion was organized by the Chicago Innovation Awards--Groupon was a 2009 winner--and hosted by Google, which is one of the contest's silver sponsors this year.

While Michelin executives were in Chicago to promote its latest edition, I caught up with Parmeet Grover, chief operating officer of Michelin's Travel & Lifestyle unit in North America.

Grover does not have a gourmand's background. He hired on with Michelin's U.S. subsidiary in Greenville, S.C., in 1996, after receiving a PhD in engineering from Georgia Tech. He moved into his current role last year. Grover says he's been a "foodie" from way back, however. "If you go back to Renaissance times," he told me, "being technical doesn't prevent one from having other interests that range quite widely,"

Here's an edited version of our conversation:

Q: With Chicago, the guide will be in three cities in the U.S. What's the plan for expanding further?

A: Globally, this will be our 26th city. And in the U.S. there are some large cities we're looking at. You could imagine they'd be in the vein of the ones we've already done.

Q: Do you see adding another city in 2012?

A: I can't comment on that right now.

Q: How has American cuisine changed in the last several years?

A: I think changes in American cuisine represent the changes in our society. If you look at the diversity of the country, it has increased over the last two decades. As a result, there is a lot of fusion cuisine.

But I think we may be onto another important trend, which is using a lot more natural ingredients, locally sourced ingredients. I see this even in Greenville, S.C., where my family is based.

Q: Michelin is doing things the way it's done for more than a century, sending in trained reviewers anonymously. Aren't you behind the times now that everybody is doing crowdsourcing?

A: In terms of the wisdom of the crowds, we respect it. But I think what we bring is another perspective that nobody else has. We are using professionals who know cuisine very, very well. What we have developed over the last 100 years is a process that's worked very well. When we say it's one star or two stars, whether it's in London or Tokyo or New York or one day somewhere in Africa, it means the same thing.

Q: So that's your advantage--you can get consistency because you know who your raters are?

A: Exactly. We are a company of engineers, so we have a process that is followed rigorously. And we never compromise.

Q: Is there any built-in bias in that training, however, that would favor a traditional French restaurant over another?

A: Not at all. I go back to something in the DNA of our company. We have five values, and I haven't seen too many companies with this fifth value, which is respect for facts. When we go in to rate a restaurant or award the stars, it's purely objective, based on what is in that plate, what has been cooked that day.

Q: How many times is each restaurant visited?

Ten times sometimes. And it's not the same person. We have many different people that go, and all of the information is put into a data base and analysis is done.

Q: Your employees have been out eating in Chicago restaurants how long to get prepared for the new guide?

A: It's been two years now. We take this very seriously.

Q: So I take it you've got employees in other cities that we don't know about doing the same sort of covert operations.

A: That is correct. And what's funny is that some of the families don't know either what they're doing. They need to maintain their anonymity. We are very serious about the confidentiality of it, which is the key to staying objective.

Even at Michelin, everybody has never met these people. My first impression was that they would all be rather heavy-set men. But that's not true. We have men, and we have women, and they seem to be normal. You wouldn't be able to guess what they really do.

We published this year's roster three months ago. The list is based mostly on a survey of top executives around the world conducted by our long-time partner in the annual project, Boston Consulting Group. But the lineup is adjusted for financial performance including stock return. If we were presenting the ranking today, it undoubtedly would look different.

Of the 23 publicly traded companies in the Top 25, 13 underperformed the Standard & Poor's index of 500 stocks over the past three months. (And it's not that the S&P 500 has done all that well; it's down 11 percent since mid-April.) Just three honor-roll members were actually up: Apple, BMW, and Hyundai. By sector, only automotive came out ahead.

The laggards included seven of the Top 10, with every one of them--Google, Microsoft, Amazon.com, LG Electronics, BYD, General Electric, and Sony--down 18 percent or more. The biggest loser overall was 23rd-place Nokia; its share price has tumbled 45 percent since it was named one of the Most Innovative Companies of the year.

I'll check back in three more months to see if our ranking correlates more with stock performance. Meantime, what do you think this says about the power of innovation?

Click here for the full profile.

People in their 20s and younger no longer buy print newspapers, music CDs, land-line phones or watches, Cole noted. (I don't think they listen to over-the-air radio, either.) Now, Cole said his research has detected that they're not signing up for cable or satellite TV like prior generations. Instead, they're watching video on laptops or even their cell phones.

Cole also predicted that most newspapers have just five more years before they're killed by the Internet. (Cue up Ziggy Stardust.) A handful will survive: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Washington Post. Women's magazines will live on, too, since readers buy them as much for the ads as the editorial content. He didn't give odds for us.

It's about people, people. Instead of thinking about the corporation as an amorphous entity, executives need to remember the individuals at the heart of every organization. Ok, so it's not exactly an earth-shattering insight, but it's a sign of how far we've drifted that people's health, hopes, insights, and talents have come to be seen as mere grist for the grinding wheels of capitalism.

Three moments emphasized this shift for me recently:

1. John Hagel, co-author of the recent, highly recommended book The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made Can Set Big Things in Motion, talks about the "red queen effect", where executives are running faster and faster to stay in the same place. The problem is, they've essentially already lost this particular race, and trying the same old techniques only means they'll fall further behind.

Now, says Hagel, is precisely the time for executives to figure out what, precisely, their firm is really about. And while Ronald Coase may have won the Nobel Prize in 1991 for his theories of efficiency within the industrial organization, executive focus in 2010 has to be on talent development. Not, says Hagel, simply a cursory nod toward human resources but a concerted effort toward making a focus on talent integral to every part of an organization.

2. At the recent New York Forum, I sat in on a breakout session about how large corporations should handle the challenge of disruptive innovation. Truthfully, there wasn't much consensus; it mainly seemed like an opportunity for panelists to trumpet their fervent support for and dedication to the discipline of innovation, the definition of which was unclear. But Glenn Kelman, CEO of online real estate company (and would-be industry disruptor) Redfin, had some insights that have stuck with me. "The number one thought I have every day is how do I make Redfin the best place to work for engineers," he said. "One great engineer is worth 10 mediocre engineers. And a great engineer won't work somewhere that engineering isn't valued." For Kelman, the future, intuitively, lies with people. Make them happy; watch your company thrive.

3. I've recently been reading The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems. I've written about PD before; it's a curious philosophy of examining the behavior of outliers to see how they've intuited a better way of doing something than 'most everyone else in their same society. The most frequently cited example of PD in action comes from two of this book's co-authors, Jerry and Monique Sternin, who documented it in action while working for Save the Children in Vietnam. By looking at what a few individual parents did with the same resources in the same situation as an entire community (in this instance resulting in healthier children), positive steps for all could be identified—and rolled out for the wider benefit of the inhabitants.

But PD isn't limited to developing markets, and the authors include some potent examples from business, too, including from within giants such as Merck and, believe it or not, Goldman Sachs. The former company tried PD as a last resort in Mexico, where it brought about the resurrection of sales of the drug Fosamax, a miracle osteoporosis drug that reps had nonetheless struggled to sell. Manager Andres Bruzual called his district managers for a meeting, outlined the principles of PD and told them to have at it. As the book's other co-author, Richard Pascale, outlined to me on the phone: the managers were initially both skeptical and horrified. But once they realized that the onus really was on them to figure out the next, best steps, they rose to the challenge. By allowing individuals to feel like they had some say in how they should best do their job, Merck Mexico pulled off a seemingly impossible success story.

In an age where people can work anywhere, on anything, and for a generation that hasn't grown up with the promise of a job for life (and is probably horrified at the very idea of it), the real challenge is for the corporate supertankers of our time to prove they can turn away from the very real threat of being out-maneuvered on all sides. Thoughts on which companies might prove the Titanics of the age? Or which behemoths have the chops and the wherewithal to adapt in time?

Actually, the new place, a Chicago restaurant called Girl and the Goat, will be identified with Stephanie Izard, the 2008 winner of television's Top Chef, who'll be managing the kitchen when it opens shortly after the Fourth of July weekend. And financially and legally, Girl and the Goat belongs to Kevin Boehm and Rob Katz, a duo who already own three other restaurants in Chicago. But the interior design is Herold's throughout.

"This is exactly how I wanted it," Herold says. "I wish I could buy a house right now. I would make it the Goat house. Everything I would have in my house."

Herold, a 38-year-old Dutch native, showed me around the 150-seat dining room the other evening, as workers were still installing light fixtures. It is purposely anti-Las Vegas--Izard, whose previous restaurant, Scylla, was often described as cozy, and her backers had made "no glitz" a hiring condition. But the space does have some dazzle, which I'll get to in a moment. (Sorry, no photos yet.)

Girl and the Goat is made to feel comfortably worn, lived in. It is Old World heavy and dark, from the 10-seat communal tables made of thick, weathered oak planks and lit by clear incandescent bulbs in antique glass fixtures to the back bar, which is made of 14 iron fireplace grills from the early 1900s that were sandblasted and fitted in a two-row span. Colors are muted. The seat cushions on the steel-brushed oak chairs are so deep green they look black.

The fireplace grills, which will be backlit when everything is up and running, are one of Herold's three big statements in her design. Another is a brightlly colored, boozy painting of a girl and a goat that measures 7x7 feet and commands an exterior wall. Izard (the wild-haired girl in the painting) personally commissioned Quang Hong to do the work, based on a smaller one he had done for Scylla.

The other is a pitch-black screen in the center of the room. It's what's left of the supporting wall that had bisected the 116-year-old structure. Rather than leave the exposed bricks, Herold decided to encase them with cedar boards--after setting them on fire in a big parking lot to char them and then coating them with resin. Herold says Japanese builders have used this technique for ages, though she had never done it anywhere before.

"It is very bold without being loud," she says. "I wanted to make strong statements without being in your face about it."

Until now, neither Herold nor 555 International has had much of a profile in Chicago, though the design and custom-furniture firm has been based in the city since 1988, when it was founded by industrial designer James Geier. Herold, an interior-design graduate from the Institute of Fashion and Design in Amsterdam, hired on in 2000.

In all, Boehm and Katz have spent $1.6 million to create Girl and the Goat. Boehm says it was well worth it. "I always expected it to be really cool and really authentic, but I didn't expect it to be sexy."

In an email to me, Clark Davis, vice chairman of HOK, writes: "I believe this will be a very slow recovery in the private sector, because businesses are still very reluctant to add people--and job growth is the single largest driver in commercial real estate, design, and construction."

Since payrolls peaked in mid-2007, the nation's architecture firms have shed a quarter of their employees. And at least some still collecting a paycheck have too little to do, says Phil Harrison, president of Perkins + Will. "Design firms are holding onto staff, even without sufficient work to keep them busy, because staff are so valuable and there is a hope that work willl pick up," he says in an email.

Harrison predicts the rut (or rout) will last another two years. "The combination of three factors--expensive marketing, lower fees, and excess staff--is causing many firms to operate at significantly lower levels of financial performance, which is likely unstainable," he says.

And I thought the media biz was in bad straits.

Murdoch was frank about the disarray within the media industry, though he declared himself optimistic at the pace of innovation that's occurring in response to the disruption. He was also somewhat effusive in his love for Apple's iPad. "This is a fantastic invention," he said. "It combines the ability to present all forms of media to all people, from three year old children to 100 year old men." He added: "I believe that within five years, you'll have many hundreds of millions of iPad or iPad-like devices in the world. This is a huge new market."

Along with reiterating his widely-stated belief that publishers made a huge mistake in making digital content free of charge, Murdoch also took a swipe at President Obama, describing him as "too aloof" and criticizing his politics as a lot more "left of center" than those who voted him in had perhaps realized. So what, asked moderator Maria Bartiromo, should Obama be doing to get the U.S. back on track? "I think he should be going in the reverse direction," said Murdoch. "You won't get this country right until you have less government and less taxes." Unless Obama changes direction, he said, the United States should brace itself for another two and a half years of "at best no growth".

Other policies also came in for some Murdoch opprobrium, including his disdain for the healthcare bill, and his call for better support of entrepreneurs and small businesses, which will, he said, provide the only way out of the recession. As for immigration, he said, current policy is "an absolute scandal".

"We educate people and then we give them a ticket home," he said, echoing the likes of Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, who proposed the Founders Visa program to promote startup investors in the U.S. "The best brains, who'd love to settle here and start businesses, go through our great universities, and then we say 'sorry, you can't have a green card'," said Murdoch. He shook his head before launching into another tirade, this one about the state of the education system. "Our inner city education is a disgrace," he said. "In Los Angeles, people talk about 'dual language education.' They're turning out illiterate people in both English and Spanish."

Final jab of the night went to the "greenies", as Murdoch declared himself a skeptic on climate change before outlining his support for running natural gas pipelines through Alaska. The strategy could save the United States $150 billion a year, he mused. And anyway, "We didn't buy Alaska to look after the moose." One final politically incorrect opinion that nonetheless got a big laugh from the audience.

(Image (c) Diane Bondareff)

The "Design Mind" gong for someone who has "affected a shift in design thinking or practice through writing, research and scholarship" went to Ralph Caplan, former editor of I.D. magazine (RIP) whose book By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV is a must-read for all those wanting to wrap their heads around the sometimes opaque and confusing discipline of design. His 1982 book, updated in 2004, contains pithy soundbites by the bucketload, including my long-time favorite: "while design by committee represents a solemn commitment to mediocrity, design by collaboration is simply the way the world works, usually for the better."

Stephen Doyle, who picked up this year's award for communications design, has a similarly trenchant take on design by committee. For Doyle, who regularly works on projects for mega-clients such as Barnes & Noble and Martha Stewart as well as smaller commissions such as illustrations for the NYT op ed page (shown), the key is in access to the C-suite. "Good design starts at the top. You have to work for the boss," he said when I called to congratulate him this morning. "You can't make headway against a bunch of middle managers who are trying to cover their asses when reviewing design work. Everyone wants to not fail, so things will get diluted on the way up. "

Doyle, who proudly told me that he's been at the helm of a design studio in New York City for "25 years and one week", added: "When you deal with the leader they're so much less afraid of failure because they're responsible for success." That's an attitude that anyone involved in commissioning or reviewing projects of any type—not just design—would do well to bear in mind.

Here, take a look at the full list of this year's winners and runners up. Congratulations to all.

Still, I wonder whether the desk will enable Steelcase to break out of the office market and into classrooms. With a laptop-friendly work surface, the node, as it's called, lists for $599. By comparison, basic desks by market-leader KI start as low as $169. What's more, I haven't heard of a school anywhere that's got extra cash these days. Many, in fact, can't even pay all their teachers or afford new books.

At a Neocon event in Chicago, Corcorran tells me that in four months of pre-sales, the company has received orders for 50% of the first year's production. Yet in better times--say, seven years ago when Steelcase decided to branch out into the education market--the order rate probably would have been higher, concedes his boss, Steelcase Group President James Keane.

Schools are mostly submitting try-out orders, buying desks for a classroom or two rather outfitting the entire building. "There's probably less across-the-board opportunities in this sort of economy," he tells me. "But we've been very happy with the success so far."

The node is so unusual because, as a newcomer to the market, Steelcase looked not at how classrooms are generally equipped, but at how teaching has evolved. Used to be that teachers stood in the front and drilled rows of students much like a sergeant would address the troops. Today students are just as likely to be learning from one another in groups. Students also need a place for their backpacks and, at the college level for sure, a work surface with room for a laptop and a book.

Steelcase began developing its desk with help from design shop IDEO about a year and a half ago, Corcorran says. The early prototypes, on display at the event at the Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy, were assembled from crudely cut plywood and old plastic chair seats. Nonethless, they look basically like the final product.

The node comes on wheels, making it easier for students or teachers to roll them into new arrangements. The concave base, made of aluminum, provides an out-of-the-aisle space for backpacks or other gear. Not only does the plastic-molded seat swivel; the work tray does, too. And the 22x12-inch plastic surface can easily accommodate a laptop with space to spare.

One of the bigger changes was to make the seat bigger. Corcorran says Steelcase added an an inch and a half to the width so that today's heftier students can squeeze in. The desk, which weighs 32 pounds, can support up to 300 pounds. The American classroom has changed.

The Excel-based software was developed over the past year by the American Institute of Architects. It will become available for free on the institute's website on June 11, Day 2 of the AIA annual convention. But it won't be open to everyone: Firms will have to sign on first to the AIA 2030 commitment to reduce the predicted energy consumption of their designs by 60% through 2015 and produce only carbon-neutral projects by 2030, to slow global warming.

I got a peek at the program from Rand Ekman, director of sustainability at OWP/P|Cannon Design in Chicago, who helped design and test the new software. The process is simple and straightforward. Firms input a few particulars about every project (even those in conceptual stages) such as projected annual energy usage, gross square footage, building type, and current energy standards (to establish a baseline). Do the math, and you get a three-part score for the complete portfolio, not just a few exemplary projects.

There is a hard part, however, and that is collecting all the facts and figures for the spreadsheet. Based on his experience at Cannon Design, which has 15 offices across North America and two more in Asia and a catalog of more than past and current 650 projects, Ekman says it could take big firms at least a couple of months to come up with the required data for the first assessment. But after that, the data gathering should become speedier.

So far, 103 firms have made the 2030 commitment. That's a relatively puny tally at a group with 80,000-plus individual members, though it includes several of the very biggest, such as Gensler, HOK, and Perkins + Will. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Kevin Harris, a one-man residential designer. The AIA will publish the annual scores of each pledge, and Ekman hopes that peer pressure will prompt more architects to join in and try hard.

"Every firm is considerably more facile with the issue of energy than they were 10 years ago or 20 years ago," Ekman told me. But he added: "One of the major premises of this tool is to drive change within the design practice. There's little bit of the keeping up with the next player that is going on here as well."

Together with Koolhaas, the collaboration is being overseen by OMA partner Reinier de Graaf. I caught up with him on the phone to ask what it was all about. An edited transcript of our conversation follows:

How did you get involved with Strelka?
They showed up on our doorstep. They were looking for an established name in the world of architecture to boost their educational program. That program is also a little bit broader than architecture per se and since we have quite a tradition in doing projects on the fringe or outside of architecture, that's how they ended up with us.

How will the collaboration work?
The school doesn't offer a degree or diploma, which is interesting and could prove to be a handicap or a freedom. It's a post graduate school, without a PhD, which basically allows us the chance to do whatever we want. That also allows us to develop with potential students a product at the end of the education cycle.

So you plan on being pretty radical?
It sounds radical. But the school is in Russia: There are some limitations. And, it's funded with Russian money, and the themes have to be about Russia and have to address Russia's contemporary problems.

What are the themes?
There are five and they're very diverse. One is looking at thinning. Normally, planning is for growth, but there's a shrinking population in vast parts of Russia so this is planning for thinning, shrinking. We'll look at the preservation of part of the Soviet architectural heritage, a theme from Rem Koolhaas at Harvard. Then, energy. I have been involved in a number of energy-related projects, thinking about ways to shift to renewable energy and reduce emission production. Russia has vast natural resources but as the world changes, they too have to shift to diversify their economy.

That's three. And the other two?
Public space, but marking the fact that we live in an age where essentially most developments in cities are the consequences of private initiatives. So that should be "public space" -- in quotation marks. And finally, treating design as research subject. In other words, to coldly look at how design works, commercially, and how careers in the design world are themselves designed. We'll take a very unemotional but deliberately unartistic x-ray of the world of design.

What's the state of architectural education in Russia currently?
If I'm to believe the organizers, it's diabolical. That's why they are starting the initiative. I don't know if that's true. A lot of things can be said for the state of architectural education anywhere. Even in established places, you can wonder how much innovation or fresh things go on.

What's the nature of the deal with Strelka?
We have a business arrangement with the Strelka Institute, and we'll be paid different sums of money for different involvements. We'll take it in bits to see how it works out and to see how much we should be hands-on or leave to run on its own. The eventual goal is that it should run on its own. We provide the kickstart and direction by implementing things at the start quite forcefully, but eventually it should become self-perpetuating.

So how much do you get paid for your involvement?
We don't give out that sort of detailed information.

What's your five-year vision for the school?
Well, first of all, we're skeptical of visions. In our work, our visions are implicit in the projects. Which means your vision can change. A lot of architectural work is improvising in contexts that are stronger than premeditated ideas. But it's about the architectural discipline pushed to the boundaries, so architecture can reacquire an authority it hasn't had recently. The architectural discipline has been tainted by vanity and hermetic navel-gazing, and the intellectual authority has not grown in recent decades. Particularly because the industry has voluntarily shrunk to its core business. We're out to stretch architecture as far as possible. The school is not a commercial business that has to make money so it's a very interesting vehicle to do that.

Image: (c) Strelka