ALISON BEARD: And did it ever feel daunting when you won the competition, to move from this very academic world where you’d been focused on theory and making drawings, but never building them into sort of physical things? ALISON BEARD: They also, those kinds of projects, require intense collaboration with, you know, not only government officials and clients, but often other architects. You have to be able to dictate a letter at the same time as you’re making a drawing, at the same time as you’re correcting a novice’s approach to a model, at the same time as you’re discussing something about how much the building is costing, at the same time as you have to get on a video conference with a client in Paris and tell them, no, no, it cannot be that.