DM: How did you get into collecting art?
WN: Gordon taught me to go to art galleries when we were working on the Air Force Academy. Gordon took me around to all the marvelous, very fancy galleries. He has a very fine collection, and he could afford it. He took me around, and the first thing he did was to march through the gallery and move gradually, very carefully—seeing what was on exhibit—into the back room. And he'd sit down, pull out his pipe, and say to the gallery director, who was there of course, "What's good today?" And they would haul out the Picassos, the Mirós and the Dubuffets, and the things that he liked. I would go around with him on Saturday after we had the meetings on the Academy. Later I would go on visual binges myself, after I got a bonus, and I'd spend twice what I had, hoping that another bonus would make up for it later.

DM: What was the first piece of art you ever bought?
WN: The first piece was a Motherwell.

DM: When you select a work, what do you look for?
WN: I don't look for field theory. I've been interested in Lichtenstein since we bought Black Flowers from his first show. I was in New York on one of my visual drunks, and the show was just coming down. It was the first benday dot painting that had been hand dyed. It was not mechanized. It was six hundred dollars. I bought it, took it home. I really loved it because of the contrast between the geometry of the background and the vase and the flowers. Kind of angry. Lichtenstein was a radical painter really. People don't realize it. They just think, "Oh, he does the funnies." That's not really true. I admire the way he works. The paintbrush. The Abstract Expressionists were hot, so he did brushstrokes that play on Abstract Expressionism. When Monet's A Day In the Country was traveling around, he did a series of takeoffs. Sometimes I buy a painting if I see a relation to the whole history of art, which I think is important, just like it is in architecture. Lichtenstein extends A Day In the Country to the modern style. I don't have to have a Monet, I have a Lichtenstein. It satisfies my desire. It's a good painting too.

DM: You said once that you thought that art works opened the mind. Can you say more about that?
WN: Well, I think I've been explaining that. I mean, there's a relationship between A Day in the Country and the whole of Impressionist painting. Here's a modern painter who does an Impressionist painter. I appreciate the fact that a modern artist today is not just denying the past. He's really doing the same thing I'm doing. He's working and exploring and expanding on Monet. Notice that the benday dots have disappeared. Now there are some stripes there.

DM: What should the firm be doing today that it might not be doing?
WN: Today it's as important to talk together as it was before, to establish a dialogue around real issues. Today's problem isn't breaking out of the box, it's blob theory. It's really three-dimensional geometry theory. It's tension theory. It's art theory. The Gehry art buildings. You can sit down and have a great session about these theories. How should they work within the firm? What do the partners think about them? What are the theories we want to project? It may not be one theory, but you may want to refine the different directions. Now I don't know if the firm is doing blob theory. I could hardly get them to do a field theory building. Actually, I have some thoughts on field theory and the blob. How would I do a blob building in field theory? In a way, they flow into each other. The Moebius strip that has no beginning and no end. But Gordon and I would also talk about paintings. You can also develop the dialogue around art or music. I can list three, four, five composers from the 1950s and 1960s that I think are good. I like to play them with Chopin and go back to Ravel. Ravel is a traditionalist, but he did do some experimenting . So I'm interested in that. Music and art were all a part of my life and I brought them into the studio. I feel that the profession is losing its relation to culture in general and to its own culture.