This is the BBC.

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.

Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the Radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit bbc.co.uk- Radio 4.

Music

My castaway this week is the architect, Amanda Levit.

Pushing against the boundaries of conventional design, she applies her creative discipline to everything from department stores to mosques.

Plenty bespoke brand new structures of course, but she's also trusted with the highly nuanced task of giving a contemporary flourish to such establishment shrines as Lord's Cricket Ground and the V&A Museum.

Over the years, her work has won her an international reputation and the highly prestigious Sterling Prize for architecture, but her position at the heart of the design establishment is unlikely to have dimmed her unconventional spirit in evidence even as a teenager.

She was asked to leave her well to do girl school for sunbathing naked on the roof of the science block.

A little later, she secured her place to study architecture without the requisite maths a level and in spite of her portfolio not featuring a single drawing of a building.

She says of her work, it's a competitive world, you need to be good at politics, urban planning, art history, it is hugely broad.

Every time you begin a project, you enter into a new world, you come out of it, changed, enriched and so welcome.

Amanda Levit, a very demanding project is almost at its end for you and that is you've been designing this new entrance and courtyard and gallery for the V&A Museum.

Very high profile, I'm sure it has been highly demanding, how do you think it has enriched and changed you this time?

Well, this has probably been one of the most exhilarating projects I've ever worked on.

To work with an institution like the V&A, where you are working with curators and keepers who know more about their subject than anyone else in the world is an extraordinary privilege.

And there is a slow pace to the museum that I initially felt very frustrated by, but I grew to love and to savor it because for every move you make there was forensic questioning as to whether this was the right thing to do.

And it's challenging and it forces you to state the case in a much clearer and more argued way.

To walk through a completed building that you have seen from the beginning of the creative seed that you yourself have had, to then walk through your own building, tell me what that sensation is like.

It is an extraordinary sensation, having designed a building, having developed the drawings.

...