I was influenced by the architects I analyzed under who were subsequently influenced by the architects that they analyzed under. For instance, I feel that design is in its best when all the unnecessary elements are stripped away to show the fundamental basis of the design. In other words,”Less is more,” that the great modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once said. I learned this from my third-year studio professor, that was able to work for Mies. My fourth-year professor would ask us to discover”what the building wishes to be,” that is a term he learned from the great Louis Kahn, who he studied under in the University of Pennsylvania. Now I use this term once a week.
All these are two facts I shall mention to you within the first 10 minutes of our interview because basically I studied under Louis Kahn and Mies van der Rohe, once removed.
That is how it works. It is just like the telephone game. Vitruvius whispered something to Palladio hundreds of years past, and Thomas Jefferson thought he noticed what Vitruvius said but totally got it wrong, and leaned over to Christopher Wren to repeat it, however, Christopher Wren was sketching a church trophy on a napkin, which McMead and White stole and utilized for their layouts in the White City in Chicago, which deeply offended Louis Sullivan, so he moved back into the workplace and fired Frank Lloyd Wright for stealing his clientele. At least that’s what Wright’s pupil Kevin Bacon told my second-year professor, that told me this story, though I was sketching a church steeple on a napkin in the moment, so that I may have misunderstood him. This is the way architecture works. It is a flawless system.
Listed below are a couple of of the phrases I learned from the architects I studied below, who tell me that they learned them by the architects whom they analyzed under, who said them first. And they state architects aren’t good with words.
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Pllc, jody Brown Architecture
Louis Sullivan may have”borrowed” this expression from the artist Horatio Greenough. At least that’s what I discovered.
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This construction by Louis Kahn clearly”wants to be” circles.
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Pllc, jody Brown Architecture
You may think your way through a construction, but you really shouldn’t.
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This is quite correct.
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Philip Johnson was more amusing than I can ever hope to be. I believe he is loved by me.
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I can only suppose that Frank Gehry was saying this”ironically.”
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Technically, Victor Hugo was not an architect, however, he wrote a novel set in Notre-Dame Cathedral, so that’s close enough.
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Ayn Rand is also not an architect, but she wrote a novel about an idealistic architect who blew up a building that was not constructed exactly as he had designed it, and Gary Cooper played in the film they screened at the atrium of the design school that I attended. Essentially I analyzed under Gary Cooper.
Like I said, it’s a flawless system.