Norman Foster

There's no absolute way around this.

I mean, it may be that

The budget is absolutely fixed.

We have that amount of money.

How can we optimize?

How can we maximize the value?

Well, first of all, there is not the relationship that you would expect between quality

and how much you spend on a building.

There are so many buildings I could point to where a fortune's been spent and you just wouldn't want to go near that building.

We need the whole list.

There are buildings where they're noble buildings and they were built on very, very tight budget.

So quality is an attitude of mine.

It's not how much you spend, it's how wisely you spend.

So that is philosophical, but it's tangible in terms of the end results.

So you may have somebody who says, that's it, this is my resource.

And there are three resources, and one is the most valuable.

So you have money, you have time, because time is also money.

The longer you spend on your project, most likely, the lower you're actually going to get because... So in many ways, when you can do something faster within reasonable limits, then you're maximizing.

Often, if you have a fixed amount of time and you draw that out and draw it out, the money is losing over that bit.

But the third resource is creative energy.