Six elements, without which no architecture exists. Every project begins by asking what each one wants from the site.
Sun
Every plan begins with the sun. Where it rises decides where a family takes breakfast, and where it sets decides where they gather in the evening. Light is the first material of any project. It reveals mass, it carves the void, and it gives each room its own hour of the day. I draw the sun before I draw a wall.
Earth
The ground is never an obstacle. It is the brief. Topography decides where a building anchors and where it lifts, and the materials come from what the place already knows: stone that weathers like the hillside, timber that greys like the trees around it. A building should look inevitable on its site, as if the earth had been holding a space for it all along.
Water
Water brings stillness and time into a building. A reflecting surface doubles the light, and the sound of moving water slows people down. In dry country it is a promise. In the mountains it is a mirror for the sky. I use it sparingly and deliberately, where a threshold needs calm or where a space should ask you to pause.
Wind
A building must breathe. Openings are placed in conversation with each other so that air moves through rooms the way it moves through a valley. Screens filter it, courtyards catch it, thresholds temper it. Ventilation is not a service hidden in ducts. It is a spatial idea, and you feel it on your skin.
Fire
Fire is the oldest room. Long before walls existed, people gathered around warmth, and every living space I draw still organises itself around that memory: the hearth, the kitchen flame, the low warm light of evening. Fire decides where a plan has its heart. Around it, furniture turns inward and the day ends.
Life
In every drawing I make there is a small human figure, because without it the drawing means nothing. Architecture exists so that life can take place: a wedding, a meal, a prayer, an ordinary morning. The measure of a space is not how it photographs but who people become inside it. That figure in the drawing is the whole point.