I'm doing all right out of this - I'm getting bits of Mina's cake - but the domestic picture - workaholic international architects, offices in Japan and London, projects in Spain and the Netherlands and Korea, a demanding child - suggests that they could really do with some more commissions back home, where you can take a taxi to the job rather than a 747, and return the same day. And London IS home, for all their determined adoption of outsider status. They met at Harvard, worked together initially at Rem Koolhaas's office in Rotterdam, but London is where they have chosen to base themselves, because London is, these days, architecture's international headquarters.

"We've been lucky," says Alejandro. "We've had the chance to work in many different places. Usually that leads to a kind of global brand. Our beginning was about trying to escape from that global branding, trying to develop this more alien approach - always starting everything from scratch." But now, looking back, they realize that there are recognizable FOA ways of doing things. "We call them FOA's Ark," says Alejandro. "What kind of animals, what species, have we been collecting in various places over these ten years? All architects have animals they nurture."

"Foreign Office Architects: Breeding Architecture" is at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts from Saturday November 29 until February 29 2004.

FOA website: www.f-o-a.net
ICA website: www.ica.org.uk