"The wall is a kind of mechanism within the city and reacts in a specific way to its surroundings. The black facades play this game, for they are oriented to the dark north side; and anyway, the whole location is rather stern and austere. If you look at a North African city, you’ll see that the houses are also closed off from the urban space. Their walls form the backdrop to an active public realm, but this has nothing to do with the private internal realm. The wall is like a threshold separating two worlds. In my building, you have to cross this threshold to move from dark to light surroundings. Basically, the project was about light, the special light of the East End. Light has a very emotional effect. In this building, though, the technical aspects are also very interesting. The building’s a solar collector, an environmental system; it stores heat, and the walls conduct it through the entire building. We also have a kind of double ventilation system. The building is small but very complex." David Adjaye