 What I love about architecture is it really is the art form that we all encounter. It's larger than life. It's what you can't avoid. You can't not see a bad building that's 30 stories tall. Similarly, the wonderful old hotel or the ballpark or the Golden Gate Bridge, things like that become part of the shared civic culture in a way that a wonderful painting or a wonderful sculpture or a wonderful novel doesn't. It becomes part of how you define and measure the city and how you live and where you live. And so the architects who can grasp that and learn to keep working on it, that the point of architecture is the living with it and the moving through it and just the incremental experiencing of it, those are the ones who really do resonate. People who are choosing to live in certain cities are doing so because they like the look and feel of the place. And so architecture does get debated where should you put this big new building in the city? Should you put a new bridge there? Should you tear down this landmark? So it's not as if people feel like they care about architecture, but they do care about seeing what they're going to put there and things like that. I think people do talk in cities where people care about how things look. I hate to say it, but if you're choosing to live in Detroit or Cleveland, bless you. But aesthetics aren't going to determine the future of that city. There are other more pressing things. And so even though people might care about what something looks like and there might be focused local battles, there's so much else going on. Whereas in a city like San Francisco or New York or Chicago or Boston or Portland or Seattle, a lot of the worst urban problems aren't there. And so a lot becomes how do we protect and enhance our livability? And then the architecture does become more important. With all due respect to architects, society's got more on their plate than thinking about these wonderful creative people who aren't just painting things that hang on a wall or writing poems that go into a chapbook. A lot of what architects do is taken for granted. They design buildings that don't fall down. They map out subdivisions that people live in. They build the shopping centers that people use. There's just an expectation, the notion of the heroic act of building. Building is very easy now. And it's just something that happens as you're driving by it or that happens in the distance or on the skyline as opposed to this real civic achievement. You know, we're a very mobile society. You know, you don't think much about a person who designs an airplane either. Yet look at this miraculous thing they do. They design a system that puts this big heavy thing in the air for hours of the time. The papers that have architecture critics, and there aren't as many now as there were, that really all came out of the 60s. In almost every case, newspapers had started having architecture critics. It was because of, we are a special place and we need a strong voice to say what's being lost. They weren't preservationists per se, but it was, hey, this is an important civic asset, which is our architecture in building good new buildings and saving the good old buildings. And it's being desecrated. There's a real freshness in the 60s about that. And it did kind of hurt the architects, because part of it was, we can't just assume these guys know what they're doing because they're doing a lot of really bad things. But it was also, look at this brilliant building. This is the answer, so on and so forth. Some are successful and their actual artistic talent or creative talent or design talent is almost peripheral. They're successful because they're good business people. They work well with land use attorneys. They know how to work with political consultants. They figure how to study a zoning code and find the loopholes and figure out where they can get the bonuses and the concessions and return for certain benefits and so on and so forth. So that's one type of architect. Another type of successful architect is an architect who's a good developer architect who knows how to design efficient buildings that you especially see this in housing and you see this in suburban office buildings or whatever. They know how to take the box, divide the box up efficiently, wrap the box easily, and it gets built okay. The successful architects who I think need to be encouraged, the successful architects that make us think about what an architect can be, are the ones who have a real intuitive sense of what something could look like, how something could feel, how something could meet the landscape and also just a sense of craft and material to create really good spaces and to create buildings with a really good presence. In other words, they're not just paper architects, they're not just kind of drawing cool things, but they figure out how to... they have just this kind of instinctive sensibility about the presence a building has in the large focus, but then also the way it does as you touch it, as you walk into it, the spaces around you. So they're at once artists, but then they're also just kind of... there's an almost environmental sensibility to the shaping of space. This sounds obvious, but technology is changing architecture and it's making so much more possible. The dividing line between paper architecture and what can actually be built isn't really that far apart anymore. You look at the paper architecture of the 60s, like the metabolists and things. That was pure rhetorical architecture. Now you look at the flowing types of towers and things, and those are buildable. They might be buildable at $1,000 a square foot, which means they're not going to get built, but there is... the line between real and the fantastic is almost gone now. So I do think that changes because even if the realism of budgets and where you live says they can't be built, just the fact they can kind of get certain architects thinking in that direction. With regard to a different kind of mindset among younger architects, what I hear more and more and more is how important the green issues... how important the issue of sustainable design and really green building and all is at the college level, that the notion of designing the icon and being the next Frank Gehry isn't nearly as important as designing the building that is zero net carbon, so on and so forth. That's what I hear increasingly from professors, from people who give lectures at school, so on and so forth, is that your 24-year-old architecture student, they're not reading the fountainhead and they're not going to build bow and wanting to build one of those. They're more wanting to design the building that, you know, sucks greenhouse gases out of the air and tunnels them into the earth or something, which is neat. So it's hard to say what's at stake because you can design bad stuff that works well. Suburbia, you know, you can hate how a lot of suburbia looks, it's really suburbia from like the 70s on and you can point to all the ways it didn't work in terms of the dependence on the automobiles, segregation of uses, so on and so forth. On the other hand, it did create nice places for families to have their kids in the sense of, here's my family, here's our backyard, here's our cul-de-sac. At that most basic level, it's like, and I like living here. So basically you can, the challenge for architects is to make things better in ways you wouldn't have thought about before, but once it's made, it's what you want.