Peeling away the layers leads Siegel to success.

Robert Siegel feels the same wild enchantment sketching a plan for building thick glass museums in the middle of the Sinai, or border stations integrating quasi military and environmentally friendly strategies in Maine, as he did when he first sketched houses on graph paper as a child and fell in love with architecture.

Today, his playground is the landscape of New York City and his firm, Robert Siegel Architects, has a new sun-drenched office on 37th Street stocked with a materials room where samples of building skins ranging from granite to wire mesh provides the staging area for his childhood musings to be made three dimensional.

As the focal point of his practice, the New York office provides the architects on staff with a place to flourish, as Siegel believes all good space should. All of his projects, from the large scale business lounge at John F. Kennedy Airport, to the Swiss Tourism office in Rockefeller Center, to the Korean embassy, are designed with the culture of the people who will spend time there in mind.

"It is hugely important that we build a place to empower people to participate in or continue to participate in their rituals, places for people to be inspired to be creative, to do things they wouldn't be able to do if the space wasn't there." he said. "It's an amazingly powerful thing to be able to design spaces for human occupation."

Siegel got his first practical taste of architecture while still studying as an undergraduate at Syracuse University, when his friend's father hired him to design a beach house in Worchester, Mass. The $8,000 he was paid for the project provided him enough for his basic living expenses in college--which included hot dogs and beer, he admits--and gave him a practical foundation for his work. Shortly thereafter, he earned his Masters in architecture from Columbia University. His firm--which was started in 1991 in the basement of a brownstone in Brooklyn--now employs 15 people and has an impressive international portfolio. That work is grounded in projects incorporating cultural traditions into buildings.

One example of a large scale project that helped cue the firm in on cultural nuances was the Korean Embassy in China, which was designed in the style of an old Korean palace through which the firm had to carve out entrances restricted by tradition to the South Side of the building, and juggle multiple parking areas.

"We had to figure out, when a VIP is going to enter a building, how he is going to be entering--by a bike or a rickshaw or a limousine? We had to take into account what proximity from the door that official is going to enter," he said. The project worked and made the firm proud.

"We have to utilize an approach to design, one that can work in different cultures. We have to always remember that this is not a McDonald's approach to architecture, not a cookie cutter approach to architecture that we are trying to replicate all over the world. As architects it is our responsibility to try and figure out what is unique about a place, what is culturally appropriate, and integrate those concepts into our work," Siegel said.

The firm pulled out all their tricks to design the National Museum of Korea for a competition project.

"The idea in Korean architecture is to slowly reveal the layers of the building as the visitor is walking through, rather than hitting him with the big dome as architects are apt to do in American Museums. It was a significant challenge for a one million square foot building," Siegel said.

Oddly enough, the work in Korea and China gave the firm credentials that allowed it to enter and win a US General Services Administration competition to design a $50 million border station on 50 acres in Calais, Maine. The architects dipped into their materials pallet and found one inch wire mesh that they decided to use as the skin of the building. When wrapped around the building, the mesh will act as a one way mirror for the border guards inside, while reducing solar gain and echoing the geological patterns of the robust rock outcroppings surrounding it, thus allowing it to blend into the terrain.

The project required large scale orchestration of 45 professionals in ten different disciplines, from structural engineers, to acoustic engineers, to a facade consultant/front specialist, and made use of some of what Siegel considers his best skills to be as a "design leader."

"If I don't know something, I don't b..s ... I find someone that knows. I think that is the main reason we are successful. We are able to integrate different people as advisors who regard the design as the over-riding factor bringing us together," he said.

In the future, Siegel hopes to branch out his office with satellites in other countries. For now, however, he is happy to be in New York City, where his current work includes a hotel renovation project and the renovation of a 5,000 s/f loft in Soho, giving him a chance to create some beauty at a time when projects are less likely to be the developer-driven strip malls that periodically dishearten him when he sees them in the region.

"It's a great time to be an architect in New York. I have been around for almost 25 years, seeing what is going on here. European architects have been raising the stakes. Developers are seeing that good architecture makes more money for them. I hope the construction industry will continue to become more sophisticated so the craft of buildings improve," he said.