Transcript: My parents were very motivated educated people and they really just wanted us to be happy, but being happy when we were being raised has a different definition now than I think what parents think happy for their children is. Happy was in that era what I think parents projected would they would make them happy and not necessarily what would make you happy. Some still trying to figure out what happy is.

Yes. I think --- but I wouldn’t have listened to it anyway because I was so driven in the product of my generation which was this ---- kind of baby boomers and it was our generation that was ---- had the responsibility of changing the world and so given that burden of that responsibility no matter what anybody said to me I probably wouldn’t have listened to it, but if I were now a child and I still I could think I am a child in lot of ways and I would like to hear this advice now I would still feel free to take on anything that I thought would be interesting and not be afraid.

Transcript: I think that we have a responsibility as a professional to understand the timeline of the profession. What has happened in the profession. Who has made a contribution and learned from those things to free yourself to become your own voice. When I was building this house in North Sea which we are making the documentary of and I work with Peter Shelton my partner and my dear friend from college Reed Marson. I realized that the building went out I could kind of see the intellectual collage of who I was as pieces of the building stood at various stages. I could feel the ghost of Lucon when I looked at the Port concrete. When I saw some of the glass details I kept thinking of the architects collaborative in Boston, when I looked at some of the wood working on the cladding I thought of Ed Barnes or Sert and then the way the stair was conceived I thought of the purpose and I started to realize that pieces of who we are, are often pieces of who we looked and study, but its our responsibility to then become ourselves. So how do you take that? Where you can almost dissect your own psyche and the layers of building is such an interesting tapestry of those pieces of who you are and then hopefully when they come together they become you what you owe to who you become and then I realized when that building was done because I love the archeology of great people in my profession meaning whether its their drawings, their furniture that lining that designed democracy emerged, which is such an American idea that we embrace many cultures and we celebrate them and we celebrate ideas. So the building was international amalgam of people and things that as Americans we are very open to and that I had actually collected the archeology of those people and as those things occupied the building I realized that their archeology informed the building that they inhabit.

Recorded On: 6/1/07

Transcript: I have always thought since I was little if you eat a candy bar and you threw the wrap around where does the wrapper go and we have so many wrappers now musically wrappers, we have candy wrappers where ----- and I am thinking over all these years if I count the number of candy bars I have eaten I wonder where that all stuff all is and I do think about that. I wonder where is everything going, where does it end up because once we get rid of it, we think it doesn’t exist anymore, but its got to go somewhere so I do think about that like ---- and this is not be politically packed about green, but I have always wondered since I was little aware if you could have a follow something a matter that you wasted and where all that stuff ends up. I wonder I wonder what happens to the world because of that. So I think about that and then I am a little concerned with the acceleration and the breaching of formality we have with each other through blackberries and emails and there is a kind of new ones lost and a respect lost and I miss that. The formality of addressing somebody of respecting somebody. So you get all this ---- they are kind of like web based fought. We are someone just fought something when they are angry on the toilet to you about something and you don’t understand the new ones and they have no compunction about sending it to you at one in the morning on a Saturday night because they are thinking of it then and yet they don’t realize what that does on the other end to the people who receive it. So I wish we could love our media, but we could step back from it and respect each other and use it in a way that honors each other instead of a kind of flatulence [phonetic] or masturbatory exercise.

Recorded On: 6/1/07

Transcript:

I think I was raised and taught to please and to serve. I am in a service business and not appreciate oneself enough and may be if you can free yourself of those shackles and enjoy who you have the potential of being in who you are that you get that out of the way and you can move on and so I think of that a lot.

Transcript: I always find the idea of the next project the most interesting thing if there ever is one you are always nervous but what we have we are lucky enough to work on a very big scale and very small scale. So we like working for Noel [phonetic] as we are doing furniture in a very small scale eight chair. The chair is the hardest thing to do.

Recorded On: 6/1/07

Transcript:

Recorded On: 6/1/07

Transcript:

Recorded On: 6/1/07

Transcript:

I wouldn’t say necessarily identify with but respect and admire the way they think and the way they create, the way they create, the way they build. It goes back to ---- all the way back to Michaelangelo and to Bernini and its Stonehenge from very primitive things through the change in the 20th century whether it’s Adolph Ogner and Adolph Luce and Joseph Hoffman and then Corbett Seang [phonetic] and the future is, I mean it’s hard to isolate out one because all of them play a kind of tactic in history and the late Louis Conn has struggled so much, but I had the good fortune to actually attend his lectures. He was a poet about architecture and he could distill things down to their very essence and that’s a great lesson to learn how you take something down to what it really means and its true meaning and fine meaning and let all the distractions fall away because ideas are timeless and when something is honest its timeless. It’s not an ‘ism’, those are fashion movements, but the great Lucon and there are so many wonderful people like Calatrava, heard of them and Demiurge and Zaga, Frankurie on and on and on that do beautiful work.

Transcript:

Well. I feel like the more architecture one gets to do, the more open ended it seems and in a way the more difficult it becomes because even though you have been exposed to things there are so many great architects. There are so much good work that you feel like you never get the chance to do your best work. You are always looking to the next project to hopefully have that be the thing and I really enjoyed the late Robert Altman’s comment when he received his lifetime achievement award when he said you are giving me a lifetime achievement award for 41 movies. I am still making the same movie and I think architecture is that way, it’s a process of continuing and the beauty of architecture is you don’t have a kind of narcissistic fuse that goes off in your 20s and its over. You hopefully get better and keep learning and the great architects didn’t reach their great work until they were getting on years and that’s hopeful to think that you don’t have an expiration date.

Transcript:

Well. I don’t think we can participate in history if we don’t understand history and so --- and it’s not just architectural history, its art history, political history, economic history and all those things make you a responsible person who in your own demeanor and field can then respond, but I feel like if I didn’t know from Stonehenge or hatchet are up through a piece of flying shrapnel. If I didn’t understand the process the evolution and the instincts of architecture then I wouldn’t be responsible. I wouldn’t understand how to go about it, but knowing your place and that you exist in a certain time as part of a kind of continual is so key to being a member in good standing.

Transcript:

There is no recipe to the creative process, but I think that first of all we are in the service business. So we can’t be so arrogant to think that you just kind of draw, scribble and that’s the end of it and those things that look like they are scribbles in the end are not really scribbles. The process is first of all understanding the parameters of the job who your client is, what the program is, what the financial situation is, what the context is, what the building code is and then synthesizing that ingesting all of that and then throwing that all out the window because if you don’t ingest that and make that part of your system you are not free to move on from that, but you need to understand that to move on and so we spend a lot of time trying to get that into our blood stream. So we are freed from it and then something may happen.

Transcript:

Well. I like to think of architecture as a kind of environmental art because architecture is a broad based synthesis of a lot of kind of problem solving and it has the potential to transcend solving the problems and become an art form and so that can include the architecture of the exterior, the architecture of the interior the interior itself, the landscape and the overall experience one has when they go to a place and how that place can be ---- has the potential of being extraordinary or interesting and so I like to think that may be when we address each of the projects no matter how big or small that you can give that level of thinking that pile of clay and those sticks that were on your desk a kind of what you start with every single time and how you can build the world is comprehensive.

I think the challenge of making a place, a person, a thing the best that can possibly be through synthesizing all that elements available to you and taking it to another place almost birthing an idea and the idea is so strong that it’s palpable and it can be developed on its own. It’s that rigor of birthing an idea and building an idea that’s the most rewarding thing.

Transcript:

Recorded On: 6/1/07