First Sentence

"On a sparkling winter morning late in 2001, the Swiss architect Jacques Herzog tucked the trouser legs of his immaculately tailored dark blue suit into a pair of somewhat too large Wellington boots, covered his long, closely shaven head with a hard hat and strode onto a muddy building site in the depths of one of London's poorer neighbourhoods to show a group of expectant journalists around what, even before it was finished, critics were confidently proclaiming one of the more astonishing modern buildings in Britain."