On Architecture
I believe, and I've told anybody who will listen to me, that an architect should see as many things that are designed or have designs, whether they're natural, paintings, sculpture, graphics, architecture. He should see as much as he can. He should spend as much time in a museum looking at great art as looking at buildings. My elementary theory is that our brain, a computer, absorbs all this whether we're aware of it or not. When you get down to doing some work, the more you see, the more this computer may throw out. You don't say, "I want to do the cathedral at Chartres." You'll just subconsciously have more choices than you would if your computer was half-empty because you didn't see anything but architecture. I don't think you can rationalize influence as historians like to do. It may have been a poster you saw that has more to do with the design of some element of a building than all the buildings you've seen. I don't know how it happens. There are two parts of this: seeing a lot of things and then knowing how to see them. I'll digress. My wife and I were fortunate to have a good friend named Henry Moore. He made me wake up to this fact when he said that as he worked and worked, he began to see more and more. In other words, if he'd looked at a tree 40 years ago, he hadn't seen as much about that tree as he did 40 years later. An architect is trained in shades and shadows. When I look at something, I can see the shape of the shadow and what causes it. A layman doesn't see that. He just sees it as a circular tree. Henry felt that his eyes were finally getting sharp after 60 years.
[I can't draw in the true sense. Designing has nothing to do with drawing.] The word "drawing" means you can etch, you can do sketches. Designing a building involves... Just take, for example, a major building like Connecticut General. We had people writing a program, trying to find out from the owner what he was going to do with his people and how many people he had and what each group did and how the material or paper moved. We spent at least six months with just that. Not a goddamn bit of drawing. Making diagrams showing relationships. What we found out in those six months is that in an insurance company there's a key group of executives who make all the policies. From then on, there's paper that moves from one procedure to another. It's nothing but a light industry of moving documents for review or for preparation from one group to another. It requires large areas for moving these papers.
The program led to a huge, horizontal low building, three floors. This building was to house two thousand people. The owner, the top man, was a brilliant man—Frazar Wilde, one of the great figures. When he hired us he said he wanted a building that would be built for three thousand, so there would be a one-thousand-person expansion in it without having to do additional building. He wanted a building that was the most economical building you could build, as long as you included 30 years of maintenance in that economy. So what you did was build an expensive building initially. There was no paint in this building. It was all Formica and things like that. He was a brilliant man. As I say, we used to meet with the owner and ... [the project developed] from a program to diagrams to suddenly a plan with courtyards to give light. Nobody was farther than 30 feet from glass—all intelligent thinking, logical thinking. It has nothing to do with aesthetics. Fundamentally, a building has to work. Now, there are a lot of buildings by great architects that don't work at all. The Guggenheim is a disaster. It is no more a museum than I am Napoleon... On our own we were doing elevations and models to see how it would fit on the site. We got involved aesthetically in how to build it, what materials. It was a magnificent 250-acre site. We wanted to have a building where the people felt part of the site... We established a clear span of 60 feet. Up until that time, most buildings had columns every 20 or 25 feet. Columns are a nuisance because they destroy flexibility and also take up space and affect the layout of desks and things. So those were [the] criteria, logical criteria, of why the building is what it is. When we got [the] Banque Lambert, I told the Baroness Lambert, "Hiring an architect is like getting married for four years without sex." That's what it is. It's a close relationship. When the chemistry works between people, it's a marvelous experience. Frazar Wilde and our office got along beautifully. That doesn't mean he agreed with everything. He would raise intelligent questions and we would try to answer them or do studies to see what could be done. [We never showed him what it looked like, never.] After a year of all this, we brought them a complete finished model of how the whole thing would look, site and all. A glass building. Because they had gone through the planning, it seemed natural to them. It was approved in about two minutes.
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