On Gordon Bunshaft
I try to do the best I can with the personality that I have, good or bad. The simplest thing I can say is I'm very pleased with what I did with my life. I think it was due to several things. One, that I had a dedicated family that saw that I had every opportunity to learn and be educated. Two, that I think I had a fairly sound mind that was not too poetic but had a good deal of logic. And, three, that I lived at the right time as far as architecture was concerned. There are probably more reasons, but perhaps the most important thing of all is that I persevered stubbornly on what I believed. Last—and probably more important than any of them—is that I was very lucky.
I'm not a profound guy. I've never been an intellectual about architecture. I think what led every young man to modern architecture was that he's young and wants to do what's new. I don't read books. I mean, I read a lot of novels and things, or biographies, but I very seldom read architectural books at all or art books. I look at the pictures or the drawings.
The only building that I think has a major concept that's unique and my own is the [National Commercial Bank] in Jeddah. It is a totally new approach to solving an office building in an extremely hot and dry climate. I didn't think there was anything unique in Lever House. We just did the best we could. You didn't think about it. We weren't inventing any new things out of it. The U.N. was being built—the same glass wall. We improved a little on it.
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