No matter what you build, if it's in the city it must have a public character, and when it starts to be put away, more and more privatized, the city becomes uncomfortable to live in. I had a discussion this morning with Toyo Ito who pointed out that more and more these boundaries are blurred. It's like a membrane he's interested in creating. The Asian city in general, in contrast to the European or American city, has always gotten it's sense of life through a juxtaposition of different functions and scales together. The kind of city where people are not living in the same places they're working seems to be fundamentally different from most Asian cities today.
Most Asian cities have a mix and that's where their life comes from.
For example, in a city like Tokyo of course there are tall buildings but at the base of these tall buildings you'll find a sort of jumble of little buildings that change day to day as needs change, very rapidly. I call it a process city, and this kind of constantly unfinished, process city is actually where the life is and how a city like Tokyo gets its energy, from this small scale. The rate of change is so small in Europe that when there is a change it's very noticeable. You are building a house in the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. In Kuala Lumpur itself, among younger architects there are those who criticize this energy consuming and ecologically devastating tendency, and there is a claim for more horizontal architecture, which interestingly enough is something about which you have written.