Very much, because he’s interested in that same kind of process. Bonnard, Matisse, Indian miniature paintings, which he collected. That’s where the light comes from, a spectral relationship within the painting itself.

I think that I followed the influences of the people whose style and cooking I admired. When I went to Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in the early days, it was the best and the most exciting cooking in the UK at that time. Later on I worked with Thomas Keller and Alain Ducasse and eventually I chose to go to work in Le Louis XV because when I set foot in the kitchen, I just knew it was for me. I think you can see all of those influences in the techniques and the flavors that I use: there’s a real purity to the way that we cook and a real natural process here at my restaurant, Core, that always stayed with me from my time at Alain Ducasse.

Only Mies influenced me. Le Corbusier I met. He was a nasty man, but obviously a genius. You don’t have to like the people just because they’re geniuses. Mies and I got along better and we became pretty close. I worked with him on his greatest building here, the Seagram building, which was kind of fun, but again, you can’t be a hero-worshipper and be an uncommon architect; you’ve got to be your own man. So I split with Mies and did a different kind of work.

That’s an easy question. It was, of course, George Balanchine. He came from Russia via Europe and settled in America in 1933. He started a little company which was not very successful, so he had to start over and over again. Ultimately, he founded the New York City Ballet. I happened to be born at the right time, came to the right place, and had the fortune to audition for him, and work with him, because he is the genius of the century of ballet. I learned how to dance with him.

I think it’s a combination of being a good listener, trying to understand what lies beneath the surface. And I mean that in the most literal sense.  It could be a cultural institution. It could be an enterprise. It could be a site. It could be the culture of feng shui in an Asian society. The things that you can measure and the things that you can’t measure. And it’s about drawing on the best of diverse skills, the reality that an architect cannot design and realize a building independent of engineers, skilled engineers, structural engineers, environmental engineers. So for me, it’s about harnessing the creative energies. It’s not about designing a building and handing it out and saying, “You make it stand up. You make it warm. You make it cool.” It’s about getting those skills in unison.  The analogy is perhaps a round table, which is non-hierarchical. That doesn’t mean to say that you don’t have strong leadership. Obviously, you have to have that; otherwise, it’s designed by committee. So it’s answering the material needs and providing an element of surprise, something that perhaps nobody believed might be possible to add. And it’s not about money. Quality is an attitude of mind. It’s not about how much you spend. It’s about how wisely you spend. You’ve really got three ingredients. You’ve got material resources, money; you’ve got time, and in many cases, time is money; and you’ve got creative energy. And it’s the creative energy that is going to make the difference in terms of those other ingredients.

I would hope that there’s a recognition that in some way or another it has contributed to the breaking down of barriers. Somehow deinstitutionalizing some of those buildings. They might be workplaces. They might be cultural buildings, where under one roof you have the contemplation of great works of art and the studying of the history of art. That might be linked to a degree of innovation, harnessing technology to a good end. I’m bringing an element of joy and uplift to spirits.