 Hey, people are still trickling in. Welcome, everyone. It's a real pleasure to have James Wines of Sight with us this evening. And I'm really thrilled he has accepted our invitation to be here tonight. It is fair to say that James Wines and his practice site are having a significant moment. Everywhere you go, James and Sight's work is there, being talked about and rediscovered by a new generation of architects. This is, of course, the most important form of recognition that can happen to an architect. Not the recognition received as the work is being produced, but rather the one that emerges many years and even decades later. Then, not only is the work recognized for its lasting influence and understood as ahead of its time in the positions it's put forth, but it is also able to be received as continuous and consistent across time, forming a solid body of work carried from project to project and from project to the field with legible resonances produced across it. Today, we recognize James' work as seminal in many different ways. First, Sight's most revered early projects, the series of showrooms the practice designed for the best stores, registered the postmodern interests of its time alongside other architects, such as Venturi Scott Brown, in particular, with whom Sight joined forces in enlisting architecture's ability to engage the ordinary, as well as embrace its capacity to communicate. But beyond this, and in a more radical way, Sight's work was unique in tying architecture to the environmental art practices of the time, while also mobilizing so openly and polemically architecture in and as a constant critique of itself. In 1987, Wines publishes The Architecture, in which he traces a new triangle of exchanges between art, architecture, and environment, redefining each in relation to the other and articulating a burgeoning scene of artists and architects who were together offering an alternate to the canonical and mostly formal concerns of both art and architecture at the time. Through figures and friends, such as Emilio Ambaz, Vito Acconci, Ant Farm, Nancy Holt, Mary Miskai, Tano Pesce, Gordon Matta-Clarke, Gianni Petena, and Robert Smithson, amongst others, Wines renders visible approaches to more formless, conceptual, and critical art and architectural practices, which were also often refreshingly playful, witty, and always operating beyond the safe and stable boundaries of the disciplines they were recasting. Wines' pioneering concerns with architecture's environmental dimension led to a prolific body of work that brought architecture and landscape, density and ecology, infrastructure, public space, and public art together well ahead of its time. In 1977, Sight designs its ghost parking lot, still one of the most radical intersections of public infrastructure, public art, and architecture to this day. In 1981, at the height of postmodern obsessions with historicist references, Sight proposes its high rise of homes, filling the Corbusian concrete frame with a stack of suburban homes and lawns. The practice's 1983 Frankfurt Museum of Art, juxtaposes vertical landscape and building well before such integration of green as a material for architecture became du jour. And in the early nineties, as formal and digital blob obsessions proliferate, with many incubated at this school, Sight radically reimagines ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. With a series of urban interventions, such as the Avenue 5 Central Plaza and water buildings for the 1992 Seville World Expo, or the Rosses Landing Park and Plaza built that same year. Wines' built work lives along his prolific writing. In the early seventies, Wines launches a series of publications entitled On Sight with topics such as energy for its sixth issue. In 2000, Wines publishes one of the first books defining the idea of green architecture. And in 2005, the practice publishes its monograph entitled Identity and Density with Essays by Michael McDonough, amongst others. James Wines is the former chairman of environmental design at Parkinson's Schools of Design and currently a professor of architecture at Penn State University. During the past decades, 22 monographic books and museum catalogs have explored Sight's body of work. Wines has been recognized extensively, including with the 1995 Chrysler Award for Design Innovation and the 2013 National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement. His pioneering forays into the radical possibilities afforded by integrating art, architecture, and the natural environment continues to today with increasing resonance and power. Tonight's response will be given by Andres Haki who needs no introduction and whose own practices reimagining of architecture, infrastructure, and environment is producing groundbreaking and inspiring work as well as Prem Krishnamurthi whose multi-pronged practice as a designer, creator, educator, and writer. Best known recently or at least over the past five years for the inspiring creative forays he has led through his art gallery P is reshaping the design fields in fresh and important ways. But first, please join me in welcoming James Wines and Sight. Good heavens, this is this challenge that one rarely gets is where the introduction is far more articulate than the lecture. So bear with me after that. I think a model profusely for that introduction, I hardly know what to, where to start here. And anyway, actually, this is a kind of a humorous event and an epic event because the reason I think I'm here is actually I confided in a model that I've lectured in 57 countries but I've never been invited to Columbia. And that's not completely true because I think I was invited to a, I think a drawing symposium in 1987. I think I was actually, I was here once, but never since. And it's amusing because it became a kind of comedy routine in my office because I did get an awful lot of lectures over the years, almost a thousand I think. And but every time I would have a lecture, I don't know, I think it was a king and queen and Spain summoned me to talk about Gaudí and Barcelona. And I think that needless, I was really impressed. And so I would try to announce it to my office and they said, and they said, yeah, yeah, that's impressive, but it's not Columbia. So, you can imagine how I feel tonight. I'm absolutely breathless in anticipation of what I can do and what I can say here. The first thing that I think is very important though in talking about this in general is that it is important to have open dialogue. I've been on lecture committees so I know how they work sometimes. And they can be faithful because if you're the subject of some controversy, whatever that is, and your name comes up at the lecture committee and somebody condemns you, you're condemned for life. And there's always two reasons. Either you're not invited because you couldn't possible have anything to say of any value to the institution or the other one is you don't want that person to come because they will taint the delicate minds of our students. And so here I am of tainting, but you're off the hook by the way, I'm sure I'm the oldest person in this room tonight. And as the oldest person, anything I say tonight, you can attribute to senility. So, you know, even if I say something offensive, you're off the hook, you just relax everybody. You could say, you know, the mind is going, you know, it's going fast. All right, here we go. Let's start. First of all, I wanna dedicate tonight's program to a lifelong friend, really, one of my greatest friends and a much-admired genius of art and architecture, Vito Acconci. Actually, he got a lecture at Columbia and so I harbored this envy from both of our whole lives. Well, you got invited. But anyway, he is an extraordinary figure and if there's anybody in this audience who doesn't know who Vito Acconci is, I'm looking him up immediately when you, because I know there's not a lot of communication between art and architecture, having been in academia myself. But he is really exceptional and bridges the gaps between the two. Okay, all right, let's talk kind of about today. And my subject tonight is really communication. Actually, it's two subjects. One, I'm gonna talk about a subject that really has concerned me my whole life, what is public communication. And the other, since I've never been invited to speak here, I'm gonna give you an overview, a quick smash overview of what site does and kind of what we've done, but also the things that I think that still have relevance to the future. You look at this picture, you're gonna see the problem. On one hand, there's high-level communication which is the cell phone, and there's other interpretations of high-level communication, which is the crowd scene of the public space. Now, we clearly have a problem with this level of communication. It's dominating the world, it's dominating what we actually call communication. And it isn't always really successful. I mean, we all get all part of the social network, so we get it every day and we're deluged with it. And it doesn't always give us the information we really wanna receive. I mean, this is a typical day on my Instagram. And look at it, you get kind of amateur pornography, you get people who wanna take their clothes off, that you least wanna see their clothes off. You have, at the top, that's a photo of shit. And then there's, but all sorts of things that aren't really very, very important that aren't either probably worth communicating or that you really don't wanna see. And this is, of course, we had this one, which is really a problem. And then you have the interpretation of the public domain which extends this discontent to the street. So the actual public domain itself is used for constant agendas and constant protests. And it's rather than a place necessarily of communion and friendliness, it's a comparison of all kinds of conflicts. And then there's the ultimate vehicle of the agenda, which is the t-shirt. You have the agenda of the t-shirt itself. People literally wear their ideas on their bodies. I'm particularly sort of encouraged by the one at the bottom right, fat people are hard to kidnap. So I find that invigorating. But then there's tattoos, tattoos where you actually inscribe your body with your agenda, which I find very heartening. I wish, I've been a fan of the suicide girls for some time and I wish to see more of them on architecture crits. They would liven things up to say the least. But then there's a real problem. Baudrillard identified simulacra, where the simulated is far more real than the real. But that's true of celebrity. Where the simulation, where the media saturation has created a situation that's staggering in its implication. I mean, here's the People magazine of the other side of the sexist man in the world. But this is merely an icon. We don't know this person. We see them completely as a media fabrication. And I would imagine, you know, it must feel good. You know, like Brad Pitt wakes up in the morning and is the editor of People magazine and you've just been selected as the sexist man in the world. And I'd imagine there's a certain heady euphoria when you get this nomination. But then on the other hand, I think of poor Brad Pitt. I mean, this means that Brad Pitt, for the rest of his life, every time he goes to bed with a woman, she's sitting there with a sardonic expression on her face saying, okay, big boy, show me. And, you know, no wonder Brad Pitt is an alcoholic. You know, it's a cue for instant impotence, if there ever was. All right, let's get into the meat of this problem, social and political commentary. And to what degree does the public domain does architecture and public art or public space have to do with it? Is there a role at all? Certainly in graphics, there's a role. I mean, some of the most powerful graphics in the world, you know, Goya in particular, communicated very, very controversial and sardonic messages through graphics. It, you know, it led the German expressionists. It led up to the present day, whether it's, you know, Katya Kowlitz or Otto Dix or ending up here with an anti-AIDS poster by Keith Herring, graphics have always been approved, in a sense, or it's been accepted that a graphic representation can take on a political cause. In this case, I never, excuse me, completely understood Charlie Hebdo. I always thought their covers were a little bit adolescent in their content, but it offended an awful lot of people in the Muslim world and obviously there was a terrorist attack. And so one has to take graphic representation very, very seriously. I've done a few controversial things on my own. We did a kind of a commentary on the Villard de Yers, which was really blackened storm mannequins, and a cargo net full of oil dripping into a pan for the Venice Biennale. And even the drawings were reproduced very, very frequently because it was not exactly what Le Corbusier envisioned when he thought of the Villard de Yers. And I've done controversial posters. This was a request of the, I think the Cooper Hewitt to do something about the Statue of Liberty and that was the time of nuclear proliferation. I did one more recently for sort of an anti-Trump because it's one time I know Trump was gonna do landfill in lower Manhattan. And so this is the ultimate Trumpian landfill where you actually fill in the Chasseau of Liberty. So only her torch becomes the plaza. So this gets into this whole territory we call controversy. And I asked the question really tonight, what role does architecture play? Now one thing that's very interesting about America and you certainly see it up to the last moments in the news is that the most sensible element of all American culture is nudity. God forbid nudity. Everything else is secondary to the human body in terms of the censored image. I mean, you know, what is it? Guns kill 33,000 people and injure 80,000 a year and yet guns are celebrated. We're going through that right now and on television every night. The Trumpian constituencies obviously are huge advocates of this sensibility. But what's censored is very interesting enough, the body. And I found this true and even I have had problems in the university environment because I've made drawing. One time I was trying to demonstrate how vapid and sort of cold and unappealing sketchup was at drawing the human body and I could do it with much more vitality. This was actually a greeting card or that's an invitation to a friend in Florence who he wanted to give a Roman orgy party. So I did the invitation for him. And I've done other things like starting illustrations for, this is the ravaging of Lady Kurigonde and I was going to do Candide illustrations. And then even with students, I had a figure drawing class I thought would almost shut down the university at Penn State because I was showing the transformation of the human body like you could take the sketches from the model and then I showed that you could go through the mental transformation part and use something like Hong Kong to become the body itself. But anyway, what I wanna really say, one thing tonight is very, very, very important is certainly as young architects or designers or artists that if you don't understand the human body in its entirety, including psychologically and physically and visually and space orientation wise in every respect, I don't think you can possibly practice architecture in particular or any art form. I think understanding the human body is as starting with Vitruvius onward has been there at the core of everything that we do. So that is a very important message I wanna convey tonight that is important. And if you identify every period of history we instantly recognize the periods of history which are being illustrated by these great works of art which are primarily centered around depiction of the human body. So I have two favorite phrases I put into every lecture because I think that they qualify for anything you as an artist or architect would like to do. One is from Oscar Wilde, an idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. And the second is William Burroughs, artists are to my mind the real architects of change and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. And certainly the times at which we live in are clear evidence of both of this problems. When you think of revolution, you think of obviously the Demesels de Vignon which is certainly it's a time or even today not an attractive painting but from Picasso's perspective where his whole life was shaped around Renaissance perspective and Renaissance realistic depiction or Baroque depiction to change those perspectives to the foreground and the background and to have transparent figures and juxtapositions of space of this kind were revolutionary and took a lot of courage to do. Marcel Duchamp, mustache on the Mona Lisa. Again, an extraordinary moment in time where you take a sacred icon and just change one small element and arouse an awful lot of controversy. By the way, is there any way to justify, these are all coming out very thin? Can we widen the frame a little bit? Is there a way of widening the frame? This is technology here. You guys can be very helpful. These are all slimming out the artworks and there's nothing that annoys me more than, is it okay up there? I think it looks all right. Is it all right? Because of my screen, it's looking very compressed. Well, okay. Okay, well, anyway. Wait a second, I wanted to talk about the human body and the visionaries who have used the human bodies in multiple ways, certainly through surrealism. Jackson Pollock, I mean, the entire gestural strategy of Pollock's painting was that into the painting you had to read his actions in doing the painting. So as action painting, the action became part of the visual experience, the residual of that experience. So they're incredibly imaginative and important ways in which the human body has evidence. Eve Klein jumping out into space, the idea of suspension, the idea of danger, changing the art gallery. Alan Capro in the 60s filled out galleries full of debris and in this case, tires. So rather than be able to easily navigate the gallery, your body was compelled to re-navigate the body in a completely different way. Vito Acanti, of course, my hero, did these amazing body works in the 60s. The most amusing one was the following where he would pick a person, just a random person and follow them all day long. So you can imagine the annoyance of having this kind of familiar person appear in your lobby and then at your lunch table and he follows you through the whole day. And then Vito also did kind of body extension projects like jumping up on a stool 30 times in a row and just see how many times he could do it. So these are actually experimenting with the limits of identity in the public domain and the limits of the body to capacity to exercise or to jump and change and walk and other aspects. This is another, this is Kusama using the human body, nudity as a protest element. She did this whole period of pieces called Love Forever where she got a group of nude dancers to appear on as anti-war statements throughout New York on bridges and monuments and so forth. Then a period that I had to experience directly because my daughter was 14 years old and a punk advocate at that age. So I had to go to CBGBs with her every other night as the oldest, obviously a participant in that scene. But I really did get to know all the rockers that appeared. I mean, one of the very few parents of that age who knew the clash and the Ramones and the dead boys and the dead Kennedys and the Buzzcocks and so forth in the Stooges. So I was one of the very few who were articulate in that territory. But again, it was very much involving the engaging the human body in the rock experience. And then there's a brilliant example of utilizing the Guggenheim Museum, probably one of the best ever, was the Kramasha Cycle by Matthew Barney who really used video and actual performers to engage you as a spectator in the one thing that's never quite worked in the Guggenheim, which is the ramps. I mean, most, I guess there have been a few exhibitions like Alexander Calder that looked good in the space but most exhibitions are either cramped or destroyed by the insistence of the architecture. And in this case, Matthew Barney used it magnificently. Well, let's talk a little bit now. So the message is communicated by architecture in public space. Oh, is that Ryder? Is it Ryder now? No, maybe so. Yeah, it looks normal again. Okay, well, having lived in Italy for a long period of my life, my acceptance of what constituted public space, especially when I got back to America and witnessed what was going on here, I mean, the gap between the Piazza Navona and the Millennium Park in Chicago was just like living in two different worlds. Everything about the Piazza Navona invites participation and everything about the Millennium Park Plaza repels it. So you're a little aunt in one and you're an actually human being communicating in the other. We'll talk about this as we go along. But let's talk about the ability of architecture to communicate. I mean, the temples of India, starting about 900, were really lessons in eroticism. You could actually use, sculpturally, the erotic act. It was instructive to human happiness. It was an instructive element of architecture. Now you don't find much of this around Manhattan these days, that's for sure. But the power of using the most important act of human procreation as the iconography of a building is very progressive. You know, it got a little bit more cleaned up when Christianity came into play, but it was still the iconography. It wasn't eroticism, but there was certainly a lot of controversial content that could be applied to building. You could, you know, if you didn't like your bishop, you could carve them into purgatory, right on the facade of the cathedral. So there was an awful lot of caricature, an awful lot of use of architecture itself to communicate public messages. It began to fade a little. When you look at places like Orvieto or Sienna cathedrals, you realize that the iconography was richly endowed by the fact that it was really relevant. It was part of the culture, it was part of the religion. It was very much a part of public life. By the time you got to the Garnier Opera National, it faded. I mean, the iconography was there, the articulation was there, the actually substance of the raw material, the content was missing. It became weaker and weaker. There was a gradual loss because you're also losing religious and civic messages and you were losing the patrons. I mean, what was happening is that the world was shifting to the industrial age. And so the ideal and idealism was contained within industrial materials, industrial practices, the liberation of political life, the shorter work day, the new socialism. It was embodied in different kinds of messages. So the old opera house began to look rather old and fusty whereas the Spartan vocabulary of the industrial plant, the industrial image of the 21st century began to look very appealing. Actually, it's turned into the 19th century. So when Kibbutzi talked about machines for living in, he really meant that you could create a sculptural dynamic. You would strip the sculptured iconography off the building and you would have this powerful image, obviously drawing on the revolutions of Cubism, but you could actually make a building that almost had the same language of a combustion engine. It was energetic in itself. So things began to change rapidly. And the major thing that changed, and Kibbutzi, of course, acknowledges the pioneer of this idea, is that you could remove political and religious sculptural iconography from the building, you could take it away because it was something that always was brought to the building from the society and the entire building could become a sculpture in itself. And of course, almost everything in architecture since that time has been built on this premise. Still to this day though, certainly the Ronchamp Chapel is one of the greatest sculpture as architecture buildings. So anyway, this distancing oneself from history became an obsession, even with Corbusier, who wanted to kind of redevelop Paris with these giant phallic towers and great slabs of concrete. And notice the little fluffs of vegetation in the foreground, but everything is really dedicated to the slab, the upward slab and the horizontal slab. And so the Voisin plan fortunately didn't get built. The old Paris is still there, but you can see where the incentive was moving. It was very, very powerful. And of course, it moved into almost all of the movements of the early 20th century, whether it was accused with some or constructivism or whatever. I mean, it became evident that the messages being carried by buildings and spaces were changing radically. So a long lost, I mean, I have that little bit of the RVA Cathedral up in the corner, but you can certainly see in the work of Chernikov and Melnikov and the Russians, the idea was to celebrate technology, celebrate the building process. That became very important. Now, one thing I caution you, because I'm going to be critical of this, I mean, this idea of celebrating the construction process has been around for over 100 years. It started in the late 1800s and as an idea or as a point of view or as a premise for creativity, it's been around an awful long time. So, and it proliferates every, every city in the world is based on the same paradigm. I mean, they just got taller and taller and taller. I always, if you have a feeling that there's an awful lot of developers who feel under-endowed, so they're going to show their erections by going higher and higher and higher and higher. So all cities are evidence of this discontent with one's body, I assume. But I mean, this is really a winner. This is Robert Moses' vision of crosstown expression. This is where I live on the corner of Bremen Green for 1961, fortunately, defeated by the energies of Jane Jacobs and others. But thank God, Broom Street, as we know it, is saved and that's all the lessons of light and shadow and articulation of space and scale references are still there as opposed to what Robert Moses was going to oppose on the city. But things did get imposed on the city. Even with the tragedy of 9-11, you have to admit that only two years before there was a cover story on the New York Magazine that the World Trade Center and its plaza was the most hated buildings in New York. And then two years later, they were selected by terrorists as symbols of, I guess, economic wealth or whatever and destroyed and then resurrected in the exact iconography of the originals. I mean, the message is still the same. The message is the grandeur of vast amounts of wealth and ground coverage of vertical and horizontal and ground coverage of steel and concrete. So we still have the same paradigms. Now the diversion, of course, we have the great star architects of our time, but the diversion is highly sculptural. It's basically sculpture as architecture. So it hearkens back to Corbusier's reinvention of iconography on buildings. But part of the problem here is part of the problem here is that the buildings are the big event and as a spectator, you're standing on the pedestal or next to the pedestal. So the space around, in a sense, carries no message whereas the building carries the entire message. So this is another change. And then you get manifestations like this which is, you know, La De France in Paris where people on the street, the actual occupants of the space are just merely little ants crawling around. And so you have to contrast, I mean, just contrasting with my life in Italy to La De France. Now, the big criticism immediately jumps to my, oh, James Wise is just harkening back with nostalgia to tradition. Well, that's not true because every single thing in this picture is as relevant today as it ever was. Scale reference, human scale reference. Quality of materials, light and shadow being used to maximum advantage. Water, elevation. People love to be at higher and lower elevation to look at each other. Thousands of choices of things to sit on. None of those elements of the pleasures or the messages of public space that disappeared. All that's changed is the sources of imagery or the sources of influence. So you can take everything in this picture and it's as progressive as anything you could possibly think of. And so, you know, again, we just look at a picture like this which I'm being a little bit facetious here by putting the Trevi Fountain in the middle. The Trevi Fountain attracts something like 70 million visitors a year for sheer enjoyment of the space. And I seriously doubt that any of these other New York spaces attract anywhere near that level of traffic, human traffic. So we do have a problem. We do have a problem of communication and what we're communicating. Now one of them, and again I'm being facetious here, this is just one of my, you know, is to say you're not gonna be offended and nobody has to be offended. You can always blame my senility. But anyway, this is an illustration I use in lectures sometimes because the compulsion of architecture sculpturally designed is often at the deficit of the thing itself. The teacup is a masterpiece as it is. It's perfectly functional. It's beautiful. It's gracious. We've had it for probably thousands of years. You don't really need to do anything to it. Now an artist looking at this problem would look at it and say, well, it probably could use some kind of psychological transformation. So in the hands of Merritt Oppenheim, there is a psychological transformation. That's an art, art experience. A clearly well understood art experience. Now, obviously Merritt Oppenheim was a genius and she thought of this amazing image which is one of the pinnacle works at MoMA of Surrealist's Daughtist Art. But my contention is, you know, given the kind of architecture seen today, if you took the same object and you send it to, you know, sort of five official design or, you know, very successful design offices, the first thing they would do, they'd be horrified and they'd, first of all, they would shave it and then they would redesign it. And the idea of imposing design on everything is also not necessarily the best way to communicate. So I'm now going to talk a little bit about site's work which you can just see from the texture on the screen. There is a different point of view. We've had a different point of view. And the different point of view comes from looking at architecture as a kind of subject matter. I put these words on the screen because I tried to kind of sum up because people have been asking me a lot recently for what did you mean by that? So, I've been putting it on there and one of them is the process of doing things. The content is in the process, which is interesting. Architecture as a critique of itself, making buildings and actually, you know, or anti-buildings or buildings as critiques, architecture as a subject matter for art rather than the primary objective of design and then idea, attitude and context as forms, versus form, space, and structure. Now everything has form, space, and structure. But idea, attitude, and context are more ephemeral and more mysterious. I think it was Duchamp who said, well, you know, I don't like to do retinal things. That didn't mean that you couldn't see them. He just was that interested in traditional painting and sculpture that he wanted to find another way to interpret visual art. Then we found a lot of words that we thought were not necessarily part of the mainstream of architectural dialogue or discourse, melted, mobilized, diffused, displaced, buried, floated, and everything. And over the years, in terms of creating objects or building horse spaces, we started using them. We melted, you know, we did a melted candlesticks, melted buildings, cascaded, mobilized buildings that moved, reflected, diffused, consumed, displaced, floated, morphed, buried, inverted, peeled, fragmented, ghosted, exposed, dematerialized, cracked, and collaged. And basically the motivations were guided by something very conservative. I'll tell you quite frankly that as a sculptor, I was kind of a doggedly constructivist-influenced sculptor so I was crafting big steel and concrete works when I first started my career. And actually I was pretty successful at it. I did a lot of so-called public art, which I now call plop art. But when I got into architecture, I began to realize that the real power is infirmiliarity. Everybody knows what certain skyscrapers look like. Everybody knows what a bank building should look like. Everybody knows what certain kinds of suburban houses or desert houses look like. Everybody knows what fast food restaurants look like. And everyone knows what big box shopping centers looks like. So this iconography, these paradigms carry with them a lot of terms of recognition, which are really important. So we started in the big box world, which was actually this particular big box group was owned by great collectors of contemporary art, mainly pop art, but collectors of contemporary art. And so they were very sophisticated and you needed somebody sophisticated. In fact, all of our first clients, I'll tell you quite honestly, were art collectors because I graciously sort of came from the art world, but then I kind of moved into architecture so they sort of understood that something could be controversial or different or whatever. So it's starting with this big box world and it's always the same. The way they're interpreted even to this present day, if you wanna gain attention for Best Buy or Walmart, you painted a nice color, you enlarged the graphics or there are a bunch of conventions which everyone uses. And so in a way, it's good to keep the conventions because everybody knows what they are. But when site first started, we completely inverted that meaning. And it was interesting because on the day that we opened this building in Texas, it was in 1975, the same day, architectural record came out with a big article, I think it was Cesar Pelle's Orbox as the cutting edge of shopping center design. And it had everything. It had a new logo, a beautiful logo, better graphics. It had an aluminum trim. It had bright colors. It had better everything. But the one thing it did not have is a controversial content. It wasn't talking about anything. And so this building opened to obviously great controversy. I mean, it did not please the architectural record or any official magazines in the beginning. It was actually beloved by the Brick Dayer. They asked me, what are you gonna do after this? And he said, I'm gonna retire because I can't go back to the old way. So it communicated for whatever reason. Nobody has to understand it, it communicated. And actually, as time went on, that was the first year. So it communicated vastly. It was often used in articles, for example, on social change or protest. It was often used to describe the decline or ascent of the prime rate on Wall Street. So the fragmentation idea for whatever reason communicated. Something other than design or form was being communicated. But it was interesting, there was a big article on architectural record, which I really love. This was the, they published the Houston building. And this was the issue following that. And I have to read some of these. These are just absolutely wonderful. A particular interest was Gerald Allen's mention of the power of the juxtaposition of the modesty familiar with the suddenly unfamiliar. This is precisely the root of Dio Hebb's theory of fear. I read with disbelief that article about the best products company buildings and wished to head the list of readers that object vehemently against such atrocities and abominations presented to the name of humor environmental response and humanizing the building. This is a front human dignity and an insult to architectural innovation. Decadent, for these are just other words that came out, decadent potential, sinister sense of humor, backdoor values, sheer lunacy, and tailor-made to incite the anarchistic tendencies of our society. And that was the beginning of my career. So, you know, as a young creative person, you prefer not to have this on your first, the first response. Also, there were an awful lot of letters to that are cancel my subscription. So, you know, architectural rest are lost out. Well, then our time to talk a little bit about meaning and reaction and everything. Then you start gaining friends. So, the first wave of friends talks about, oh, you know, this is about architecture and ruin. I know what's all about, you know, James is all about ruin and destruction and the downfall of the Western world. And I always said, well, not really. I was far more interested in process and dematerialization and inversion and critique and a lot of other things. And so I was just a fireback to, you know, to say that these buildings are about destruction and ruin, was just as stupid as saying that Giacometti's sculptures were about starving people. I mean, they're really not about the same thing at all. And, but the funny thing that always happens, after something is around a while and gets sort of approved, fragmentation finally gets approved. So then you have the if you please versions. You have, you know, kind of official architects at Isosaki doing, you know, very sweet versions, you know, textured versions of indeterminacy and you have, you know, you know, I'm sorry, James Sterling in Stuttgart, you know, punching a few fragments out of the building. But neither one of them have anything to do with what's going on in the pictures at the top. They really don't. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about meaning. This was an early building we did, which, you know, I always observed that, you know, buildings always stand still, people move. And also there's this definition of public art as these objects sitting in public space. I said, wouldn't it be interesting if the people stood still and the building moved? But then as you open the building, it becomes a public space and the public sculptures. You get three in one. You get movement, you get public space and you get public art. And so that kind of just simple thinking. I always tell students, you know, when you're at a loss for ideas, go back and look at the stupidest idea you could possibly find. Something none of your fellow students are looking at because they always figure it's too stupid to look at. And so this is one of those moments, you know, why don't buildings move? And actually the people who designed the movement of this were the same people who designed the lunar rover, the mechanism for the lunar rover. So it's highly sophisticated technology. But it's also, there's difference of understanding. You know, afterward a lot of corner entries began to appear on excellent buildings, on very good buildings. But I always try to point out there was a difference in motivation. There really was. I mean, in the other examples here, the motivation is far more formal and far more about design architecture. And whereas my motivation was not about that, it really wasn't. It was really about creating art and public space and movement also, all in one. Then we did a whole series. You know, the jigsaw puzzle building, that's again a dumbly simple. Why are buildings always addressed at the same scale? Why don't you allow people to address the building at the scale they feel comfortable with? So you fragment the building and they can address those scales. And in space it works fantastically well, especially in the Florida sun. Then, you know, I was talking about equilibrium. People always see buildings in some, the relationships always seem to be static and the same. And I remember, this was an engineering feat too, because I remember telling my engineers a while ago, I said, okay, we're gonna float, you know, thousands of tons of concrete in midair. And he said, well, you can't do that. And I said, well, we're gonna do it and we're not gonna show it. And they said, well, you can't do that. Well, that immediately pushed the engineering mind to challenge because they had to figure out a way. You can float that much weight in space. And they did a good job. It really worked well. In fact, it was so intensely real. I remember at the opening day, there was this really irate woman who came up to me and said, you're the architect. And I said, I timidly said, yes, it's just, how do you expect me to get up to that entryway? So for her, it had become intensely real. And then of course, again, with time and acceptance, there began to be the promo versions. And again, this is with a completely different motivation. I mean, the, you know, one by Fuchsass at the bottom, you know, that made it too fancy. Some ideas you don't have to fancy them up. And the same was true of Frank Gehry. I mean, we're just tilting buildings and stuff, but you don't have to overdo it. You know, you stick to your guns. And the worst example was this one very, fairly recently is, which is when you make it too fancy and you destroy the whole weight and balance and motivations of the building, then you destroy everything. Then it becomes merely a formal exercise. It doesn't become anything has nothing to do with that idea. I mean, there's some things when you do it, you want to be the absolute minimal amount of effort. Never overdo it if you can avoid it. Okay, here's overdoing it. Now this is because a company say, well, you know, you never show what we do. You always, you know, you always just celebrate what we don't do or you criticize what we do do. Because everybody realized these were, you know, humorous critiques of this kind of building. So we said, okay, we'll just cut through. And we cut through. And this was intriguing. We got this sculptor, this amazing sculptor who loved this project. I said, okay, this is gonna be two dimensions of time and space. I said, in the inside, it's all gonna be the real objects. But as they meet the thermal barrier and they go to the outside, we're gonna ghost everything. It's all gonna be ghosted. And so you have to cast all of these things. So like hundreds of objects, toys and pots and pans and everything, this amazing sculptor cast. So you see them going through the thermal barrier. You see the real ones on the inside and then you see the ghost version on the outside. Well, the adults really couldn't figure this one out. They just thought the whole thing was crazy, but children loved it. Did you see this little kid? Just the idea of the real and unreal bicycle as simultaneous events. So that's different than inside, outside, like normal architectural interpreters. You're getting two dimensions or three dimensions of the event at the same time. Now here's another example of intervention. I'm just a Frank Gehry kind of intervention on a standard building. Now the intervention here is obviously the shapes themselves, the shapes and the strength and dynamic of sculptural form, whereas our idea was intrinsic to the thing. You just do what's already there. All you do is change it around a little and you change the meaning. Rather than, you don't so much add sculpture, you just reveal meaning. And then the one thing that annoyed me the most over the years, this was the most annoying, is after the buildings really became, started to get really famous, people would always send me these things and say, oh, I saw a building that was just like one of your buildings. And it was always these gee whiz funny building things. And I just hated them because they had not even the modest sense of the word, what site was doing? These have nothing to do other than that they're cartoons or caricatures of what we were about. And again, just putting us at the top of the page, you know, typical sculpture, you know, sculpture and park, we were putting art where you least expect to find it. Whereas all the strip across the top is where you expect, you always expect to find public art sitting somewhere, but you don't expect to find it in the junk world. Okay, and this is actually one of the best descriptions of what we were doing. I'm kind of getting to a point here, shifting gears. But this is a very good critique of site that came out in Paris a few years ago in a magazine by Leopold Lempere who said, there is an architectural invention by James Wines of site created that fascinates me and consists of designing architectures that he's expected to be, yet this paradigm is being frozen, corrupted and dramatized in a way that cannot be ignored and therefore questions this paradigm. It's a perfect description. This technique is a perfect architectural adaptation of what the situationists were calling de Tremont which I actually believe in. A form of acknowledgement that resistance towards establishment can only be accomplished by the same establishment's weapons and pictorial objects and therefore the hijacking of these weapons in order to flip them back toward their system of production. That was, that's what I call intelligent writing. And actually I had an interview today, whoever interviewed me was brilliantly intelligent. In fact, I'm gonna take him around as a guide. Anyway, and it's a credit to Columbia where intelligence does prevail, I know. Anyway, just a picture of the world of shopping centers. We definitely change people's attitude to that context and it really was about context. Okay, now these are colleagues of mine and this is a very important period which every architect should know about. And I'm pushing either Columbia or MoMA, I've been kind of pressuring for a mall for a while to try to have a major symposium before we all die off, of the people who still were part of the kind of Green Street mafias that used to be called, where we all were involved in some element of architecture in an art context. Architecture as subject matter. And it was interesting because that period was pretty daring and everybody got the same kind of critique. And we were all part, I mean by the mainstream architectural scene, architectural record. We were all, there had some kind of pejorative reference either marginal or alternative or radical or outsider or unconventional. I love the one not real architecture. As though there's some omnipotent definition that is architecture. Well, anyway, I guess all this whole scene was about taking that away. One extremely interesting artist was Hans Hake, who did critiques of architecture and learned that there's having to show it to Venice Biennale in the German pavilion. And found that Hitler had actually opened the original German pavilion in 1934 at the Venice Biennale. So he did this marvelous destruction of the floor as really a kind of history of Germany. And as you walked on the floor you heard this crunching cracking. And it was one of the most powerful works of public art I've ever seen because it was a critique of the worst aspects of German cultural tradition. And also a kind of salvation that will never happen again. So the message that you can carry through architecture sometimes are very, very powerful. This is another powerful one by Agnes Dennis who when they were, you know, threatening to build a world trade center. I guess we're building it at that time. Planted a wheat field in lower Manhattan. And we were all part of a protest against tall buildings in Manhattan because they were going to change everything and, you know, increase the lack of scale reference for people and do exactly what they've been doing is really kind of diminishing the human occupancy or the pleasures of human occupancy in the cityscape. So she had this marvelous wheat field going right there at the foot which again is a commentary on, you know, urban versus rural life and how they come together. Alice Acock, you know, thought that early architectural works were underground. So she felt that, you know, why isn't burial, why isn't the subterranean just as interesting as what's on the surface? And she also did series of projects, not only subterranean projects and or sheltered projects, but labyrinth projects. She just, again, taking architectural issues somehow official architecture doesn't embrace and doing, you know, the genius of Gordon Mataclar. And we were actually good friends and argued a lot about what our role is because we both love to take apart architecture. You know, take all these familiar elements, these confirmations you have and turn them inside out. In his case, he loved to take, you know, archetypes and just dissect them so they have totally meanings. And I love to take archetypes and sort of build them up. So one was tearing them out and was building them. We used to argue and he always would say, well, why do you want to do art in those horrible shopping centers? And I said, of course, that's where the people are. And then I said, well, why do you always want to do it in sort of isolated places? He says, that's where the people aren't and they need acknowledgement. So we both had the same premise, in a funny way, but during the office direction. But he did these incredible cuttings through buildings. He completely changed your orientation, your relationship. He did a whole series here and abroad and they were just marvelous because they basically were taking the cliches. He studied architecture at Cornell, experienced, he apparently detested and emerged from it and said, well, I expect my life taking this whole thing apart. So that's what he actually did. One of the most powerful ones is when they were building the Papadou Center, he wanted to protest against that kind of very auspicious and expensive kind of construction. So his was kind of an anti-architecture. It was for the, you call it conical intersect. So it sort of confronted by making a building disappear essentially in front of one that was growing. So again, you had this conflict and dialogue. This is Johnny Patena who did a series of works in the U.S. and Italian architect artist and he took, this was just a house in, I think it was, where was it, Utah and the family were gone for the summer. So he and the students caked the entire house with mud and I think he lost his teaching tenure there. But nevertheless, statement was bold because the most ecological architecture on earth is earth and in another case, water. This was an abandoned school building in Minneapolis and during the Christmas holiday season, the students sprayed the thing with water for a week and a half and it became an ice experience. These are, in a sense, more within the areas of convention but very powerful. This is early work by Michael Rotundi and this was an area completely industrialized. It was really an industrial area and so there was a renovation for kind of a remaining historical building, their house in Los Angeles and he just brought the industrial elements, the industrial context to the house and basically consumed it. So that had a very power. This is a power again by Vito Acconci I'll show you the early body works but again, extending your perception of space. This is an amazing show he gave at the Mac Museum in Vienna. Certainly one of their greatest shows ever there at that museum but he took rooms in the museum and just simply changed your whole orientation completely, tilted them, changed them, twisted them. This is a beautiful project to experience water. It's actually, there's a cafe, it's a whole experience. It's a bridge in Gros in Austria but as you pass through the whole experience you realize that here's a bridge that doesn't just cross over water it engages you in water and in a completely different perceptual way. This is an amazing artist in the UK which I admire enormously, a racial white reed and hers is amazing invention is to cast the positive of the negative. So she'll go into a room and cast the room then bring the content of the room which is then a solid block of concrete so you're seeing the positive of the negative as simultaneous events. And for her memorial, Holocaust memorial that worked incredibly powerfully because she took all the banned books, the books banned by the Nazis and that had anything to do with the commas, anything. And she made the surface of the building the negative, it was the negative casting positive of all of the books on that shelf. So the entire building is a description of that experience and the content. Then we go to more to the present. This is certainly one of the most extraordinary projects ever done by the PS1 project. This is your own Amal and Dan in action. And this project was brilliant because first of all it not only occupied the space it brought in a sense ecological interest it brought umbil materials it brought everything to a context that really almost had no identity and gained an incredible identity for that. But it also utilized all kinds of devices that are architectural like clustered columns that you love because they can diminish or expand volume. So here they're using an incredibly inexpensive found material as a platter for life, for growth and then using it in all different forms of architectural and architectural way. Like four or five levels of content within a single work. Here's another brilliant work by somebody who's here under Jacque and you know this was one again one of the best at PS1 which was a filtration system. And the brilliance of this one is when you think of filtration when you also think of any function of architecture whether it's air or water or whatever it is always hidden in the walls or it's never celebrated. Well here's making the content of the work the celebration of the actual process. So water and the passage of water and the spirit of water and the movement of water and the action of filtering all become the final content of the work. And then finally this is actually by my daughter you know this is probably well known to all of you because it's kind of gone global. She and her partner at Eyebeam Design said that found out that everything to disaster sites is delivered on pallets. There are 20 million pallets, wooden pallets delivered to disaster sites to bring in goods just like what's happening in Puerto Rico right now. And out of these wasted just usually discarded elements you could build 70,000 dwellings. So they developed these various systems using them for concrete casting using them for all different systems of building. So you could literally build permanent residences long-term housing everything out of a material. So here's a transformational idea built completely on the recognition of a material that is always wasted. So what comes always wasted is always used. All right I'll talk a little bit more about site projects as we'll round it up. This is again a very controversial project because it's sort of opposed, you know the Corbusian Dream, the Lausanne Plan and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway where everybody would be compacted into buildings where they had no identity whatsoever and including suburbia where there's absolutely no identity possible. So we developed the high rise of homes which is basically a matrix. There's really no very little involvement by architects. Maybe architect and engineer just create the matrix. And then it was a kind of a collage project which you would insert, people would be allowed to insert their own residences, their own identity. So it's sort of the architecture equivalent of what Marcel Duchamp had once called can chance. So the beauty of the project is waiting for things to happen, hoping for the best and even hoping for the worst. So whatever happened would happen. And we set up a system for it to happen so because we knew people would need some help. Here, let me stand up a minute. I'm having a hard time. I can't sit forever, oh, stand up a minute here. Okay, yeah, I think, okay, yeah, okay, better now. Anyway, we set up a system of, you know you got to order up, we're like Sears-Rovick houses in the 20s. You could order a material, systems, construction methods. You had a kid apart and you just choose whatever you want including the vegetation. And you could even utilize, you know, buildings being torn down. I always thought it was wasteful to just tear down these nice frames. And here you could sort of insert a certain number of random houses and vegetation in these buildings. And then this one was adaptive to use. There was a department store in New Jersey, I think it was, where they were going to tear it down. So we just had to kind of reutilize the frame. It was a usage frame. And we just had to utilize it for not only house and garden, but a whole complex. And then this was sort of an idea for every city in the world it was building. And we just kind of demonstrate identity and density, the power of having your identity while living in the city. And it's certainly better than Trump there's Trump place. Trump would certainly not encourage this kind of thing. And this too had an influence, but strangely everybody was sending me stuff, oh, this is just like your project. Well, not really because it was really about canned chance and almost all of the other examples are design design and was it their crafted designs with random or seemingly random articulation on the facade. So we've sent a lot of these just like so it weren't just life. So I'm just kind of pointing out the differences. Well, public space is something that's always fascinated me a lot. It's something one of my favorite things to do. And again, you'll look at the Embarcadero public space in LA or San Francisco and look at Trevi Fountain. I think you can certainly see the difference or even New York City. These are relatively new installations of public space in Manhattan. And they basically all come from fascism because part of the whole fascist idea was that you would build these great slabs and then you'd build these buildings with the tiny windows and that meant that the people behind the tiny windows could be watching your every move. So you're under surveillance at all times. So there is a kind of eerie surveillance element. And then there's this thing called public art. This is again one I don't particularly like because it's quite a beautiful little tabletop collage by Picasso that they blew up to monumental scale with no sense of it wanting to be at monumental scale. I mean it's there but it serves this thing called public art. And this is unfortunately the view of one of the great tragedies of all time but it still was one of the least people oriented spaces in the world at the World Trade Center, not only the buildings but the space itself. And this involved what I unfortunately came to criticize heavily which is sort of the Henry Moran's plaza. And again having come from Italy where buildings were articulated by messages, complex resistance and civic messages and to go from that sensibility to the current sensibility which is dominant. I mean New York still has these plop art, public art, the things that I actually put two phrases into the language. I'm credited on the internet. I wrote an article I think it was public art, private gallery for art in America in 1970. And these two phrases, plop art and turd in the plaza appeared. And actually somebody just sent me the picture on the right there is somebody has actually it's a shit fountain and it's actually a casting of excrement in bronze and it's mounted in a plaza. So somebody's actually put the turd in the plaza which is I guess the kind of victory. Well I'm also a professor, I have been a professor and I talk about public art and public space a lot. And when I teach, this is kind of a classic that I use when I start a class to show my distaste for this checklist of dreary cliches that I call it. And I show this to the students right at the beginning. I say okay, this is going to be architecture and public space and you're gonna, these are all, you're gonna try to carry messages with your work and you're gonna work in the public domain. But if I see anything on your computer desktop or you're in your drawings to look like anything in this picture, you're gonna fail the course. Well, you can imagine students, the blood drains out of their face. And so this is kind of what was behind the ghost parking lot, sort of the opposite of public art. We wanted, this is one of our first projects, the idea of making a work of public art you could not remove without a total loss of meaning. So you could not take the asphalt off the cars or take them away and put in a museum because it would have no meaning. The context, unlike the Henry Moore, you put the Henry Moore anywhere, you could not put the ghost parking lot, it had to be in the junk world and it was made from the fabric of the junk world. And even the process of doing it was a huge success. I mean, there were actually a group of high school kids in the high school next door who didn't know what the hell we were doing. They were beginning to assemble all these old cars and so they threatened us one day and said, well, you know, we're gonna come by and we're gonna destroy your cars. And they're very, very, very unpleasant kids. And so finally the morning we started burying the cars and all the kids came back and they saw us burying the cars. Well, I can't tell you the change of attitude because every self-respecting vandal knows when they've been outdone. So we couldn't have gotten more respect. The kids couldn't have been more help. And if I said the word coffee, five kids ran and got me coffee. So anyway, the project really did communicate. And one thing it did provide is like, there's only three ways to sit down in New York. I mean, you can sit on a little park bench or you can sit on a block of concrete or you can sit at a table and chair. But when I lived in Rome, there were like 50 ways to sit on the edge of buildings, on the street, and you know, in the piazza, everywhere. There was something to sit on. So pleasing the kids, this is a new way to sit. You know, you applied a different seating experience, which is the thing. This is again, another public space project that sort of came out of this one because I guess the sponsors thought we should do something with automobiles. But this was going to be a history of transportation of the 20th century in Canada. This is what was being proposed. Fortunately, the game gave a competition. We won the competition, fortunately. And then we built this entire artery that really went from all the way, you can see it going all the way from the Vancouver Harbor all the way, then breaking off under the highway. So we included all the highways, the public space, the harbor, the boats, the fish, the cars, everything were included in the project. And then, of course, became a good walking space. They were amplified by the imagery. Everybody wanted to occupy this space. It was done basically by collecting all these articles, ghosting them like we did in one of the early projects I showed you. And then just mounting them in public space, including space capsules and automobiles. And then the monochrome gave this, this haunting kind of apocalyptic feeling. So it was sort of the apocalypse of the industrial age. And at the other time, it gave this kind of eerie sense of humor. Like for example, when the high tide went up there, all of the seals in the harbor got on top of the police car. So we just supposed things like killer cars and new, it did dust it, but it really was occupied. People really, really, really did occupy it. They territorialized this space in a way we'd never seen before. And part of the reason was that the background was informational, but it was muted. So the people look better to each other. So one thing about public space we learned, concrete can be very productive as long as the people are good to each other. And then it was used for a lot of performance art pieces and it looked good at night. So we learned a lot that there's a prosthetic approach. There's something where the people movement, their actual bodies, the engagement of people themselves become part of your project as much as concrete or steel or glass or whatever you're building with. And we call these trigger elements. They're unexpected ingredients in the public domain that attract participation, encourage invention and encourage people really to invent their own game. So we did a project for children. It's a children's plaza in Yokohama. And it's on the other side of the railway station sponsored by a Zuzu car company. So we had a very interesting client. Actually, they sent about a dozen people from a Zuzu to New York to describe what they wanted. Now, imagine this is what your client tells you. You're all sitting out here, you don't know what to do. You have no idea, you're sitting in the conference room and one client is saying, well, I want it to look like a Japanese garden. I love the, you know, the upright stones and the quality of a Japanese garden. And another member of the client said, well, I want it to be like outer space. I want it to be like people are floating in outer space. And then the more pragmatic head of the company said, well, I want to celebrate the Zuzu automobile. Okay, now here's your challenge. You gotta be like a Japanese garden. You gotta celebrate outer space and you gotta celebrate the Zuzu car. So what we did was we turned the entire plaza upside down. And these are real people. No, this is Japanese families, which, you know, in Japan, you don't kind of touch people very often. It's very polite to honor people by keeping your distance. So we had to get Japanese families who were willing to volunteer being cast into fiberglass. And then, you know, we made all of these. The plaza level is the level of the wheels of the Zuzu car. And the car maker was delighted because they just arrived at a new transmission and never because he could see the transmission. But it was a very popular part. This is kind of when it first opened. Everything was at ground level. Everything under the feet was ground level. Then the roots of trees and anything underground was described accordingly. But this, again, became activated. People, you know, there was concrete. You know, it was just what I was criticizing before. But it really did activate children. I mean, you know, kids loved it. And for obvious reason. And it also, you know, was instructive in terms of cars and people and everything. Well, then the Earth movement began. We started publishing publications, as Amal gave me credit for doing early days. I did some Earth Day posters. I'm sorry you can't see the originals. These were huge posters. And the watercolor quality, the kind of splashiness of them was kind of nice. But anyway, I did big watercolors for Earth Day in New York and Chicago. And then we started publishing books. We did three in the series on site on energy. It was really pioneering. It was done by Scribders in 1974. Really, when no one was talking about really green design or ecological design. So it was pioneering. But as I always say, this is a book that was bought by five people in my mother. Then we did de-architecture. That was a little better because at least site had gained a lot of press by then. And so our ideas, however controversial, were at least worth reading. But then I did green architecture for Tashin. And that became, fortunately, one of the best selling books they ever did. It was, I think, one of their top 20 books of all time. So obviously the green movement caught on. Even with the late best buildings, we got green. This was built in an area where we weren't gonna be allowed to build because it was filled with beautiful oak trees. So we built the building around the trees. And I'd always love the idea that I saw in Nature's Revenge, which you would see in Italy a lot, especially in Sicily, where the plants and everything would just consume the building. So the idea was to really cut up a situation for Nature's Revenge where all of the vegetation would just eventually consume the space. And this obviously was the most popular building we ever did because people would eat their lunch there. They would stay all day. And I guess it increased commerce. It was also above and below ground. I always thought that landscape marketers are always on the surface, so why not, since it was on a hillside, why not make a thermal wall that covers the underground? So it was above and below, simultaneously. And again, what is a very popular building? We did a similar building. They wanted a preservation of the landscape in Florida. So we did a kind of a, again, a landscape building like a rainforest. There was water and landscape behind the water. So it shimmered. It was really a shimmering building. Now I got into this idea that you could really make architecture move. And as Sun said, it was just like a whole vista in itself and a very ephemeral material. It wasn't as aggressive, you know, it wasn't destruction like our supposedly early ones were supposed to be. Well then we got into this real engagement with the public domain. And we began to get projects that were larger. We did the entire center piece of the Seville World Expo, which was all water and vegetation. And it was the main monorail station for the World Expo in Seville. And on one side it was all water and then an interface with vegetation on the other side and then the monorail station on top. And we had a lot of innovations that I always said that a lot of these were innovative and invisible. A lot of our earlier work was highly visible. So the controversy was the visibility. Here the real invention was the invisible. For one thing, the water pressure on the glass gave enough static electricity to run the irrigation system. And then for the colonnade, this was seeded earth inside perforated metal. So this is the way it started. And by the time the Expo opened, you had a completely vegetated environment. You know, it was 25 degrees warmer on outside. So you had a vegetated arcade and places for people to sit. Again, it was people-friendly in terms of the fact that the actual substance, the raw material, water and vegetation were the architecture. And from that we learned that you could involve everything. Intellect, emotion, sight, touch, smell, hearing, atmospheric awareness, everything. And it was in the shape of the Guadacuvir River. So it was symbolic in the sense that the ground plan was in fact the river. This is another project we did actually in Chattanooga called Ross's Landing. That was the way it looked. When we started, they built an aquarium, a freshwater aquarium there. And then they looked at it and said, well, it doesn't look much like Tennessee. It doesn't look like the river. So our assignment was to give it the feeling of the river that the building didn't provide it. So again, this completely came out of the paving. This was a project in which the paving was everything. Everything was the paving or emerged from the paving, started as the grid of the city. And then as it moved towards the river, it became the configuration of the Tennessee River. And then in the paving itself, we had lots of symbolism. We had the Trail of Tears. We had the beginning of the First American Civilization. We opened up the old canal where we broke up the paving. A lot of the, it was in the paving. The message was in the paving. So the idea of rolling up the paving, we became seeding, it became fountains. Everything was built essentially out of the paving. And it worked very well. And then for the vertical walls that faced the library and the offices of the aquarium, we had water so you would see children's movements and everything without the sound in the water all day long. So, and then down the hill, it became more and more like the river. So, and these are more recent photos. I think it's been totally destroyed. Another landscape architect came in afterwards and rearranged it. And I think they've destroyed quite a bit of it. But the idea was that the project would grow out of the paving and become increasingly vegetated in and lush in terms of landscaping. And then, you know, get a walk through water to enter the space. Well, this idea that having everything come out of the paving did have an influence. It was used certainly by Ken Smith in the Water Street and very much part of Jane's Corners designed for the paving of the High Line. I mean, the High Line is definitely things coming from the paving surface. But we do take credit for a certain pioneering here that happened in Chattanooga. Finally, I'm just coming to the end here. This is just a project that had a disappointing end. But it was something I've always wanted to do which is gardens in the sky. I always wanted to do sort of a central park in the sky. And it looked like we had the opportunity of the richest family in India. The Ambani family had a piece of land on Kumballi Hill which is the crest overlooking the city. Very expensive piece of property. And they wanted to build what they called a residence on it. So we said, well, why don't we build a residence on the top floor and make the building a series of public parks in the sky, what we called a vertuscape. Well, it sounded good at the time. And it also was very much in tune with the history of Hindu architecture in India, which is always layered upward. In other words, you're basically laying not only the structure of the human body, but the structure of the human existence. So you're moving upward through the body, through the spine, and you arrive at the crown of the head, which is, of course, enlightenment. So the spine as an extension of the subconscious moves to the subconscious and thoughts. So I did a lot of drawings for this. By the way, I'm the last architect to work on earth who I guess can hand draw. I guess that's all gone, unfortunately. But I did a lot of hand drawings just to try to figure out how this would be done. And one of my inventions, which my engineer was proud of me, was the expensive building, tall buildings like this, weighed on every floor, where you can plant gardens and everything, was the difficulty of building an air. So I thought of this idea of building a central core and then the big truss, and then hooking the cables from the truss so they go down, and then you build each floor on the ground level, and then you use the cables and the truss to hoist them into position. Well, we designed it like that. It was early. And then each of the floors, of course, would be like the vast two principles, which would be earth, water, fire, air, sound, light, and upward to the top. And I did a lot of mood drawings and vision drawing or whatever I thought it would be. We also did a lot of ecological studies, so it would work well in the monsoon season and the windy season and the heat absorption and we designed deflection systems and everything for this building. So it was a great deal of work, which it came to a disappointing end, because that was some of the final watercolors I did of the project, different configurations. But then one day, I picked up the newspaper and found out that the whole project had been given to a competitive firm that I guess was doing it much more expensive, and the whole building became the house of the Ambanes. It became the most expensive house, so the gardens in the sky idea disappeared. Although the description here of the newspapers used whole chunks of our description. In the actual description of what wasn't our project, and then they used an illustration of our project, so it was very disheartening. But you can see there on the right is the one that was actually built. And they did use the staggered elements, the layering, and they used some of the elements from our project, but it wasn't a total rip-off, but it was certainly in that tradition. And then finally, just on a happy note, we did recently opened a project in Italy, it's an art park for a prominent collector there. But it's up near the lake region, it's incredibly beautiful, and you see the Swiss Alps from the property, and it's a big art park, and it's a farm as well, and this farm is surrounded by a fence, or walls, actually stone brick walls. So the idea to make it site-specific and as ecological, this is the most ecological building you could possibly imagine, because every single thing in the building comes from within a 10 kilometer radius, either torn down buildings or glass made locally, everything was done right there. And the idea was to take the wall system and just extend it, so the actual building, as you can see from the general plan, is made out of the wall system. Then we developed a module where you would always know you're on the property that became the columns, the sculpture bases, it wandered all over the property as an identity piece in itself. So there you can see it sort of rolling off of the building into the property, and then the idea was to just pick up the piece of land, plant it, replant it, and then just pick up the wall, you see we're just picking up the wall, taking that wall right into the building, integrating it with the building, going right through the building itself. And the idea ultimately, unfortunately they're homogenizing it a little bit by there's too much trimming going on, I found out recently, but the idea was that this building would be totally consumed by vegetation, and eventually it would almost become an invisible building, that was the idea that you would, it's actually a pavilion that's a residence for the curator, but it's also a restaurant and a cafe and a video studio and so forth, underground video, so. And these are just showing how the use of the T-shaped columns and the walls and insides the same thing. Because there was a glass company near there and the views are absolutely magnificent, we thought we wanted never to block the view, so we did kind of a central core of concrete and everything inside is glass and hooked onto the core so you can see out from every side and when you come in you get the references and then this was opening day and you see it's a very pleasant place to be because it's again, it's a little too cultivated in terms of the grass from my taste, but I guess it's comfortable to sit on so it did include a lot of people. And then the idea of doing site orientation, the idea of designing a building that melts completely in. Here the idea is to recognize the monastery in the background, use the site itself and its material in a totally integrated way. Now in a way this is a kind of anti-visual or anti-radical project, to my very thinking invisibility, if you're ever ultimately achieved it, is a pretty radical premise anyway. Anyway, so that sort of ends the project, but one thing I'm encouraged about just in ending here is in Documenta 1982, we were involved in that one and Joseph Boyce, one of my really highly respected artists did an amazing project of these stelae lying around. It's kind of a commentary on architecture and commentary on the whole scene of art objects at a big expo. So in Documenta 14, just opened a little while ago, apparently almost went bankrupt doing it, but it was very ambitious, but they did a lot of what you would call environmental art, kind of art architecture projects. This is Ai Wei Wei doing a kind of fragmented destroyed building. This is actually a site project of about 25 years ago. We did a building that was components and then you took it away. But anyways, this is a recreation of that. This is an amazing project by Marta Minjenin and she did, you know, this is all the banned books of Adolf Hitler. This is a commentary again on, very much the Hans Hocky piece I showed you on Germany during his horseman and it's a Parthenon completely made out of banned books. So it's a very, very impressive work. This is another interesting work by He-Wa-Ke, an Iraqi artist, you know, it's living in pipes and since I've been to India a few times, I was very aware of the pipe problem. I mean, people in India and a number of the cities, as soon as they put the pipes, irrigation pipes down, they move in like this and then there's this horrible thing of throwing them out. So, you know, it was a social commentary on the, you know, use of pipes as habitat and then the rejection of people using pipes as habitat. This is a powerful project by Ibrahim Mahama who's a Ghana artist and he took this building which is, it's called Checkpoint Sekondi, he called the Checkpoint Senate and he took this Torwash building which is a classical building and wrapped it completely in coalsacks. So you get this very, again, very humble material, this, I'm sure coalsacks in Ghana are very meaningful, iconic element and wrapped, you know, Western European building in that material and it became a vivid commentary on two cultures. This is another cultural statement by Antonio Vega, Machutela of Mexico and it's a mill of blood and apparently in the 19th century, slaves were used to power the minting machines in the 19th. So this is a reconstruction of a minting machine which in the original form was slave driven. So again, carrying a social message. This is, again, a breeder monument of evolving and missing history. You get a sort of dematerialization of architecture as materialization. This is an interesting part, this is a kind of exploration movement. This is, you know, I guess a pollution project done by Daniel Korr from Romania which he somehow, I hoped it wasn't real pollution but somehow clouded the tower of one of the documented buildings with smoke so it disappeared and if any of you who have been to contemporary China, you know that pollution there is a major problem, some major problems around the world. China is doing its best to attack it but a lot of the world is not. So this, the idea of fuzzy buildings or fuzzy vision is certainly, again, a powerful iconography of our time. And then last, interesting enough, Idness Dennis is, I guess in my age, we've been still living, did a much more optimistic one for the USA and living pyramid which I guess would be eventually engulfed completely in vegetation. Well, anyway, and finally, you know, I just want to go back to the 1970s and the early movement of which I was a part. We called it architecture as subject matter and I think it deserves a lot of credit even today. And also, you know, and just last words to young people tonight, you just, I love this statement by Duchamp. I'm interested in ideas not mere visual products. And so much of architecture today, you know, is still highly sculptural buildings. I mean, they're iconic, starting with the TWA terminal in the 60s and we're going right well into the future now with buildings which are really based on sculptural values or sculptural strategies were at their peak probably in the 40s and 50s, you know, Max, Bill, Henry Moore and that whole period of organic sculpture and was then an influence of organic architecture. So in a sense, the masters, and there's always this issue of kind of imitate the masters. I mean, our magazines are full of buildings that are sculptural triumphs but probably your generation, I would say that's the iconography. I mean, I would say the texture is different here to here. And I think sometimes it's good not to look at the technology in terms of physical elements as Corbusier did machines for living in but to look at the whole world of both ecological technology which is integrative systems and digital technology which are integrative systems. So if you just look at this page of images, the last thing in the world that I would think of I'm not gonna start over now, that's your job but I would not think of big, heavy structures. I would think of some other way that buildings could take their shape for the future. So this is, again, I'm just opening up questions for you but I think they were probably done with this kind of public space. I hopefully, I hope this can disappear and you can reorientate your buildings to the spaces around them. So there's a total contextual experience. I mean, from sight's perspective, we made a certain contribution to public space, using what we call these trigger elements. We changed people's view towards concrete a lot, I think. But you've got a world of your own now and it's a funny world because on one hand, we're told that the only form of legitimate communication is the cell phone and yet that's not always the best way to communicate. This is the top right picture indicates and yet we got this whole enormous public domain and then people who use public space in many different ways and just look at the news we have every day now and the depressing lack of communication in the world, we probably have as architects and designers and landscape architects a real role. And so I have a kind of an humble perspective from my own I had a humble position on all of this but one thing I really advise is sometimes the simplest things are pretty good. So let's just start with the paving. That's pretty, and then go from there. Thank you very, very much. Okay. Now you know why I've never lectured at Columbia. Oh boy. Sorry it was long, but how was it? Well, first of all, thank you all for coming. Really, I appreciate, I appreciate audiences. Thank you very, very much for coming and I hope you weren't too bored and entertaining as well as got something across. Okay. I'm Prem Krishnamurthy, just kidding. Prem is on his way back, he stepped out for a moment. I'm Dan Wood, I didn't get an introduction from my wife but that's all right. Here comes Prem. James, that was amazing. Thank you so much. I mean, probably Columbia could have used that lecture 10 years ago, 20 years ago. So in a way, I can't say it was worth the wait but for me it was worth the wait. That was really, it's great. I think, I'm not gonna ask any real questions. I'm just gonna say thank you for that lecture and also that it's amazing that for you, you always say the same things. You know, you're very clear, you're always saying the same thing and yet, and I think it's like with your work as well, you know, for you it's, you're just doing the simplest thing but as an audience member and as a listener and as a fan of course, I'm always hearing different things and experiencing different things and finding different things to think about and it's just, it's always really inspiring to see how the, in your words, the dumbest idea becomes the smartest thing. So for me that's, it's really great always to see and to hear you, thank you. So I'm gonna turn it over to people with real questions. Well, it's been an amazing presentation of an ecosystem of things happening and one of the things that I think is quite amazing is that we've seen architecture as a frame in which its time was shown and that is something that is very unique. You've been talking of politics but politics that had nothing to do with surveillance, that had nothing to do with religion or with fixing ideologies but something that somehow is bringing subversion into the familiar and when we see what happens in these subversions, we see civil rights, we see racial tensions, we see LGBTQ realities, we see ecology, we see all these things that have happened in the last decades and that are rarely being shown by architecture. I think there's a political stance here being taken that is surrounded and framed with fun and in a way I think this has been an amazing moment in which we've seen how this fun architecture is being political and it's inventing the way architecture can be political. Yeah, well thank you. Well I know you're interested in this whole territory yourself to say the least and as Dan. In fact, your work says exactly, it's the extension of what I'm talking about basically but I agree. I think the problem with the public domain is you can't really totally offend people and you have to, as the Indian temples and the churches of Italy, they still had to take a position since they're in the public domain that left a lot to doubt or left a lot to speculation. You're not quite sure what they mean all the time. I mean you sort of know, I mean the church obviously operated from a more advantageous perspective because you knew what the church iconography was or what the civic leaders wanted to communicate so it's more specific. Now it's more ambiguous, you're right. You have to talk about things. Well, in your case, no one thinks of water filtration. It's the essence of why we can't. I mean the entire savage results really of all of these disasters recently has been the lack of water. So water is the single most important ingredient of all life. Nothing exists without it. And so to celebrate it and at the same time to understand it better is a political statement. I mean you're making, it is politics, you know. And it's also a statement about the whole condition of this ingredients around us. It's one element that we can't possibly avoid. And so I think that that's one of the things that are going back to the dumbest idea. It's funny things that everybody's always thought. Again, I remember when we opened the Houston building it was very controversial because at first look everybody thought this is ridiculous. This is awful. It's like the writers to the architectural record. But it was the opening, it was Texas for God's sake. So they weren't exactly the most liberal community. So, and I saw this huge Texan coming to me with a big hat and the whole thing. I mean like out of central casting. And he didn't look happy. Oh my God, he's gonna beat the shit out of me. He hates the building and everything. And so he starts his sentences, did you do that? And I said, yeah. He said, God, I love it. That's what I've always wanted to do. Kick the shit out of one of those buildings. So, in other words, and then I knew I was home free. Because you really want to have something happen in your work that gets people upset. You know, and they had to be a little upset or they're not gonna look at it. They have to have something about it that gnaws away. And so I think the way you said it's very true. I mean, we're always had somewhere down there. Even, as I say, even if it's invisibility. Invisibility can be very annoying, especially if it really takes over. If invisible architecture takes over, you can imagine how annoying that's gonna be. So, you know, again, whatever, I kind of basically encouraging a young audience here is, is, you know, we had a lot of battles along the way. And not the least of which is being uninvited. But still, you know, you want to listen to people, even old farts like me. I mean, you really, you want to listen because you may get something out of it. There may be something there that you can use. And this again, why I am sort of, now I'm sort of a tour guide at MoMA. Somehow I got very friendly with MoMA, both the art and the architecture. So I'm constantly asked to kind of take tours through. So now I'm a docent at MoMA. And, but I really realize I'm very knowledgeable. So, you know, I do Frank Lloyd Wright on Monday. And I do Rauschenberg. Very few people can do Rauschenberg and Frank Lloyd Wright simultaneously. So, but, you know, I'm not stupid. That's for sure. And so talk to older people sometimes. I mean, really, you know, invite them more often. Sometimes they do have something to say. I'm sorry, I've talked too much tonight. The only thing I felt, I felt sort of ill of ease because I really have never been here. So I thought, my God, I kind of have a whole audience who never even heard of sight. So I had, that's why it's got a little long tonight because I filled in gaps. I thought, well, maybe they don't know about this. But I will say we did an awful lot more than went on screen tonight. So, you know, look up stuff. We did a lot of installation works too. I mean, and as I brought out tonight that Andres and Dan's works were as significant as any works they've ever done, even though they are installation, they're not here, but they're in memory and they'll always be here. As we're all, you know, Alan Capra's whole, you know, herb is missing, but it's etched in granite in the history of art. So, I mean, these are things that you don't think you have to build a monument every time. You don't, you know, obviously I had a career of very modest scale, modest products, projects. But that doesn't make it insignificant. It's just because it's, you know, little. Well, I think that what you said about the students learning from this is great. I mean, that lecture was fantastic. Also, because as you said, Dan, it takes a position. And I thought it was really interesting that you started with people wearing T-shirts that wear their agendas very visibly. You know, what you just said in your comment was the idea of invisible architecture. That would be the worst. An architecture in which, or any condition in which all of the agendas are made so quote unquote neutral that they disappear so that you no longer are aware of the power structures that govern those things. Whereas again, this idea of wearing your agenda on a T-shirt. And I mean, you know, if we had a longer time for this, I really wanted to ask you your relationship to religion because I think that what's interesting is that there is this strong sense of reaction. There is the strong sense of resisting an orthodoxy. But it's also, it's something that I think students obviously do every day. They have teachers that they disagree with and those teachers that they agree or disagree with give them something against which to push. And it's this basic social impulse. I mean, you talked a lot about the idea of identity and the idea that identity is not something that comes only from the inside. It's obviously made in the juxtaposition with something that defines it. And so again, that kind of sense of really pushing against something encapsulated even in what the anecdote you gave with Pinyu and Gordon Matta-Clark. Gordon Matta-Clark saying, I want to make things that are in places where there are no people. And you saying, I want to make things where there are lots of people because I want them to have a reaction to it. I want them to push against it. That basic idea of agreement or disagreement, but in any case that an agenda is made palpable is something that's so powerful about your work. That's a very good observation and I agree. Yeah, as I say, Gordon and I had a lot of dialogue and actually I'm trying to find it now. So I'm working on the archives at site and Mark Weigly and I had dinner together and he's writing a work on Gordon's work now. But it is interesting because in a funny way we both ended up with nothing but photographs because I worked in a junk world that's completely destroyed because the next developer comes in and he worked in a fragile world where the only images left are photographs really. But they both have resonance because you say, you made a very, very cognizant and a perceptive statement because they both exist because it doesn't matter whether they're in photographs or visitation. They're about something. They're about that fact that people live in anonymous places, have anonymous lives, are never recognized and the only way you could bring a little suburban house to life is to elevate it with art. And I used to say that his work for, because they once they became art, you had to keep them around kind of. That was at least the implication and it was sort of preservation by demolition. That was the nature of his work. And I think that, again, the only thing I would encourage students to have if you want to have an interest in life is to get into something, believe something, get into an investigation that you can keep doing. You can keep on moving it around. You can adjust it because all art goes out of other art. Everything in the world goes out of other art. It's just a degree of thought and originality brought to the cause. I really do credit, Dan's heard this story. Dan and Amal, we know each other well. They've heard this story many times. But my career did start with Museum of Modern Art because Emilio Ambas was encouraging Art Director to go see site. So he said, well, let me see the work. Well, he immediately saw the work. He hated it. He said, that's not architecture. I'm not gonna go see people like that. So Emilio prevailed and Pani persuaded. So Arthur Drexler called me on the phone. He said, okay, I'm coming down to see you about an hour. So just everything you're gonna tell me you have to tell me in one hour. That's all I've got. So he came down. We started talking and you know, I knew he was a Michigan scholar. So we started talking about Mies van der Rohe. Well, I mean, two hours later we were still talking about Mies van der Rohe. And then he stopped in a mid-sense and said, my God, James, you really know a lot about Mies van der Rohe. How can you possibly like Mies van der Rohe and do what you do? And I said, because Mies van der Rohe did it so well, it doesn't have to be done again. And I said, that's why I try to do something else. I just, I have to have my own identity somewhere here. So after that, we got talking. And then Arthur Drexler stayed at my studio for three days. He came for three days in a row. And that, and it goes to show one thing that if you have something you wanna say, you can say it, just push towards it. You really just push towards it. Because you really do have to fight. You know, I said it humorous in the beginning. But it is true. I mean, I've been on these lecture committees and if somebody's targeted as the enemy, they'll never be brought to your attention. So you're gonna miss huge chunks of art history or ideas or something, simply because one person on your committee is protecting your delicate sensibilities. And certainly as students, you need to be exposed to everything you can possibly swallow. And I would certainly look at visual art. I'd certainly look at theater. I'd certainly look at performance. And if anybody tells you that, oh, well, that's not real or that's not good art or whatever. And I always hastened, oh, Ryan, everybody of the statements by Clement Greenberg, the icon critic of abstract expressionism who made these statements that abstract art is here forever. The human figure will never appear in art again. Well, that was followed by pop art. So I mean, anytime you hear a statement like any kind of absolute or that person doesn't know anything or everything James Wine says is a crock of shit, just ask yourself, well, let me check it out if you still are truly true. Just I'll check that out before I make that decision. Should we move on? Okay, we're going to open it up for questions. Not only does James know a lot about Mies van der Rohe, he also went on tour, lecture tour with Louis Kahn, which I think is always an amazing fact. So hi, thank you for your lecture, James. It was really wonderful. I feel like this is a life changing moment for me. I recently had a chance to spend some time with Stanley Tigerman. I think one of the things that was amazing was just now, as you're mentioning Mies, he claimed to be the only true Miesian, Stanley says, Tigerman. And I think from knowing his work and now sitting in a room and witnessing your work, I'm wondering about kind of maybe, I don't hesitate to use the word generational, but some kind of a generational relationship with the word irony. If I were to use the word irony from the standpoint of a Greek tragedy, or as a rhetorical device, when I see your work, it's definitely on one hand a self-aware resistance to, as Pren mentioned, a kind of orthodoxy that you want to resist. But on the other hand, the effectiveness of the rhetorical device is independent of the content that's constructed. And therefore, whether or not it looks like Mies, it may very well be Mies in that sense. So I'm really curious, especially, Andre's being there on the panel, I am also curious about Andre's relationship with irony too, given maybe a couple of generations apart. Yeah, I guess I do have an ironic sense. I look at life with a certain sense of humor. And humor, obviously, you know, people always say, oh, the architecture puts humor into architecture. Yet there had been a humor in architecture, as I showed in the beginning, a long time before in many forms. But no, I think irony is just, again, another device. You know, some of my, well, to Shampa's all about irony, you know. I mean, some of the people I admire most have that ironic edge in their work. It's just something that appears there. Others don't. It is interesting that, you know, I mentioned that Lucan and I were great friends. And that actually, I found it very interesting that I remember Bob Venturi really, really respected it profoundly. And they never quite, I felt, clicked. And for some reason, Lucan and I clicked. We talked together at Penn. And he just, from the first day, we started talking. And I think because, again, we talked about ideas. And I was very ironic. Everything I was thinking of then was pretty much about irony or critique. And he was, you know, very idealistic and very driven to great ideas. And I profoundly, to this day, admire what he did. But I also admire, you know, so many great ironies, too. You know, I really think about it. In the literature, in art or anything. So it's, again, kind of what I was saying at the beginning. I mean, we admire whatever the intent was. And I think that was the success of my meeting with Arthur Drexler. He finally said, my God, this guy has a different intent. Why is his intent any less valid than anyone else's? Let's see what he does with it. So I think that that's part of the thing. I never quite get rid of my ironic edge because I almost see everything as the other side, you know. I mean, even if I've got a Harvey Wein scene. I mean, Harvey's gonna be resurrected in six months because of whole business. He's a genius at what he does. So whole business is gonna start sliding into the abyss and they're gonna find some weird, weak excuse to resurrect him. And actually, we're talking with a driver coming up here and the dialogue I was having before we got to the dialogue tonight. And if you really look at all the great accomplishments of history, I can't think of one that had a nice person behind it. My God. I mean, Lorenzo de' Medici, he was at an asshole. I mean, he was the worst. I mean, there's the renaissance. You know, he patronized good stuff. And so we have to, you know, strike some humor as ironic balance. You know, women are brilliant and they had all kinds of defenses against Harvey just by sheer irony. They could have shoved him into the abyss of remiss and, you know, get rid of the guy or get rid of the moment, you know. I mean, there are all kinds of ways we have. But I do value having a sense of humor at the core as something that makes life livable. And architecture should be one of it. Some of it is just too serious for its own good. To the point, it really isn't very interesting, very long because it doesn't have that ambiguity. I mean, look at Oscar Wilde, that's all irony. And the longevity, I mean, I've seen the importance of being earnest, what, 200 times? And does it ever grow thin? No. I mean, not that kind of writing. So I think that, you know, we have to look at it. You have to understand what you're looking at. We'll take one more question and then, if anyone, everyone would like to join us in the cafe for a reception. We can continue the conversation there. Sorry, I didn't really mean to interrupt, but I just wanted to ask a question about what you just said, which is understanding what you're looking at because your work is incredibly sublimated in these layers of meaning and all these abstract ideas, I think, that come into it. But it's also really, really visual in a way, as you say, kind of dumb. And so I wondered how you see, what's the role of the visual reference especially in public space, let's say? Well, aesthetic are really important. It's funny how important they really are. Vito Kanche and I used to love going to this Chinese restaurant, which had the worst decor on earth. It was so bad that you just couldn't believe that anything we did. It had 35 architectural styles in one room. And every time I brought Vito there, he would go and inspect every corner. And then we'd come back to the table and we'd commiserate, you know? It's really good and we couldn't possibly do it because if we tried to do it, we'd artify it. We'd try to make something aesthetic out of it and that would ruin it because the other banality of it, the vulgarity of it, the juxtaposition of things that don't go together. As an artist, you just can't think of it. So in a funny way, I always feel this question of aesthetic is sort of, you know, I'm good at it, obviously, but on the other hand, it's sort of a, both a crutch and an inhibition to have it because you can't do everything. You can't go beyond your own tastes in a way. It's very difficult to, well, Duchamp had that famous statement, you know? I spent my life trying to avoid conforming to my own taste. And it's a powerful statement because it's really hard to do. And I draw really well and I'm, you know, it's that renaissance personality kind of in my head anyway. I sort of live in those kind of art around us times and in my, this is in my brain. So it's very hard for me to release it. You can, you do something, but it's always aesthetic. I mean, I don't think anybody would complain that finally when you look at something even 20 years later, it may have been controversial in the beginning, but usually it's just the content. And it's not the aesthetic. It's not, you know, how it looks visually, really, that you're upset. It's usually some messages you didn't like or something like that. I mean, does that answer your question? I don't know if this is a good answer, but. Yes. Thanks everybody. Thank you.