Profit.ro published an exclusive interview with Andrei Lefter that deliberately avoids discussing projects and focuses instead on choices, compromises and the architect's real position in an industry where the decisive calls are not always made at the drawing board. The conversation starts from the tension between expression and return, between the city and the investment, between what could be built and what is actually permitted. Andrei Lefter talks about growing up around drawings, his father also being an architect, and about working on large projects from the very beginning — an office building followed by retail and residential schemes — where economic reality sets explicit rules. His conclusion is that neither the creative nor the pragmatic side won: he learned to overlay them, starting from the belief that creativity which ignores budget, programme and market remains an exercise in imagination rather than architecture.