Beyond that, they have a track record many of their contemporaries would kill for. For instance they came high up the scoresheet in last year's international competition to rebuild the World Trade Center in New York. As part of the "United Architects" bid of younger names they found themselves shortlisted with such luminaries as Daniel Libeskind (the eventual winner) and Lord Foster. They are indeed architectural denizens of the whole world. So what about that batting-for-Britain thing? Wasn't that just a touch paradoxical?

No, says Alejendro seriously, it was an honour and, moreover, one which reflected well on the multicultural nature of Britain. But it might seem odd to some, when you consider the intellectual position that Foreign Office Architects adopts. The position is the same as their name. They are foreigners in the French sense of étranger, meaning outsider, stranger. They choose to tackle each job from first principles, as if they had landed from Mars and were suddenly handed the job of building something. "We say that if you can force yourself to stand outside the context, the culture, the politics etcetera, you are bound to have a wider perspective, you are bound to be more free," says Farshid, as she and Alejandro manage with aplomb the dualistic task of talking high architecture while simultaneously placating their daughter with videos and glasses of milk.

The whole idea is to bring no baggage with them, whether that is the baggage of nationality or the baggage of style. The design for the BBC's Music Centre is accordingly nothing like the Yokohama complex. This seems logical enough: a marine terminal is not a concert hall, but then again so many leading architects have a one-style-fits-all approach. Not here. The Music Centre will not be a horizontally-composed building-as-landscape, but a building standing proud, its looping structure curling upwards like a snake out of a basket. It will house the two main BBC orchestras plus chorus and singers, for the first time giving them a public, purpose-built home with a 600-seat auditorium as part of the BBC's ambitious new campus at White City, close to Television Centre. FOA have beaten superstar Zaha Hadid (their closest rival for the BBC job), Future Systems (architects of the acclaimed new polka-dot Birmingham Selfridges), Dutch architects MVRDV, and the highly regarded Anglo-Japanese architects Ushida Findlay. It seems their professionalism paid off: FOA spent a lot of time with the BBC's musicians. They were hungry for feedback from real user-clients, they say, after the necessarily arms-length design of the Yokohama terminal.