Antoine Predock Interview 2

Let me catch you, well, I know he's there. I think one thing I'm going to give you last time, you use, you talk about the highway road cut. Living in New Mexico, you can, you see road cuts all the time. But anywhere in the world, living in New Mexico, you see road cuts. Anywhere in the world, you can imagine a road cut that connects to deep time, deep geologic time.

And that the road cut then, for me, is emblematic of the notion of a section through the earth, is emblematic of thinking about architecture in the deepest sense. So often there's a kind of knee jerk toward what sometimes is called contextualism, where you look at what's next door, the building next door, and you look at some urban pattern, and you buy into it. But then you realize that that's so new, so recent in the big time scale. I always want to go to ancient time, first of all, to understand the geologic data of a place, but then understand that kind of film, if you think of geology, you know, that deep, and then culture is this thick on top, in terms of time scale. Manifestations of human culture, human occupation.

So just interested me to think about it, collapse time, and think about it all as one subject, and do buildings that have a timeless aspect, and not merely a topical response to sight of today, but to go deeper than that. How many projects do you have going at anyone's time? About 20. How do you manage 20? Well, I got an amazing backup. I got a studio of fantastic colleagues and associates, but I'm very covetous of the initial process and every project, you know, the conception, and I make clay models that are really, they're not just sketches, they really are accurate buildings that become digitized

and then off to engineers and off in all directions. So I'm able to, because another thing is that I sometimes form local associations in other parts of the country or the world for production work, for the work that, to take the conception into reality ready for construction. So I just have learned how to do it. I travel all around and somehow pull it off. How do you choose your project? Is there some aspect of the project in the city? The people you might get a chance to work with, what's important? Why do you even bid on a project? I don't bid on projects.

That's a term that isn't in the vocabulary. People seek me out. I may be aware of a project, like a competition, where I will, from my side, find out about it. But you don't kind of, it isn't a business practice, like bidding, or anything like that. I've got a business, if you peel away the layers of the art, there's a business down there. It must be okay, because I'm doing okay. But it's not something that is a priority as a subject, the business aspect of it. I don't have any business goals, business plan. I just want to clarify that in terms of, because it operates as a studio. It's how you guys work, pretty much. I feel like a director. I feel like a cinematographer sometimes. I'm thinking about images unfolding, episodic, linked images in a building that are experiential,

as opposed to recorded on film or video. I'm wondering off what you asked me. So to come back to that, when a site really moves me, and I know the people are great that are buying the project, those are the first indicators. Hey, this is a possibility. Sometimes you can't figure out the people initially, because sometimes you can't figure out the people initially to get to know them. If it's a family for a home, which I do occasionally, home occasionally, you get the face-to-face contact, and you can kind of get to know people. So I really cultivate and want to know the chemistry. I understand the chemistry that would evolve, because it's a poetic encounter.

It's an adventure. It's a ride we jump on together, you know, a client, me, my team. So I'm just pretty selective about that, and certain projects, certain subjects, wouldn't it just don't come up in my work? Certain building types, for some reason, don't come up much. I do what I believe in, the kind of projects I believe in. And then I think I have the potential for really, for making art. So this is a guerilla project you guys are doing here, covert operation within. To follow up on what you were just talking about, what kind of relationship do you look for with a client? What's your ideal?

Well, total, you know, total empathy, if possible. On the same wavelength, similar belief systems, but I also find that that hardly ever comes true completely, because, you know, everybody has, everybody's an individual and has their own, their own belief systems. So I look for, I call it spiritual commitment, you know, having a conscience about the project that we're all working on together, having a conscience about it, where you can point at any project and say, yeah, this individual or these group of people, these few people really were believers in what we were doing. I always think that if somebody's going to do a building, that there's a belief system implicit in the encounter with them, that, I mean, why would you do a building, make that kind of investment, if it weren't really special,

if you didn't have, you know, a longevity that was coming out of belief. But it is always a case. I mean, there can be a building that's, you know, some institution that, where the players change all the time, some public building. Like Austin City Hall, the city manager really believed in the project and the city council, unanimously supported it. So from the top working down, it was just an authentic process where there was trust and belief and support in what was a very unusual building for Austin. That's one example. So I just look for that kind of chemistry, you know, good chemistry, like anybody would. But if it isn't there fully, it doesn't mean I'm going to bail out, I'm going to, you know, do it in the best way I can.

Had to bail. Yeah, there have been situations like that. There have been situations where not too far into the project. In some cases, quite some distance into the project where I could see the quality of the encounter deteriorating physically in the building. And also in terms of communication and the belief, the conscience part of it. And there have been examples of that, which are very sad and disappointing when that, when that kind of thing happens, but it has happened to me. You obviously have a, in a certain way, a brand name. You need to work with something in the architectural world. You must have had situations where you figure out, after a while, if somebody wanted to do a project just to add your name associated with it, and maybe they didn't care so much about the process, is that, is that ever happened?

I think that happens in architecture, left and right. But I can't remember situations with me where that's going on. I think, you know, it may be a bonus to a client in some sense. But I can't remember being the, you know, just getting a brand, you know, being the motivation. We were, we were talking about, we have a deal with you just to get in today, we got to get out, talk to you, when you're associated with Chris. And we were talking about the kind of messiness of that. There's 30 people that will look to you from the outside and sort of describing the process, how things, how projects arise out of that. And he said, he said, he's never seen. It's pretty clean right now.

But he said, he said, he said, he's never, he's worked for other architects and he's never seen, he's never been in a situation where, what he called serendipity sort of played such a part in the final work, that you, you kind of accumulate all these different influences ideas, concepts, something that can affect that. You talked a little bit about that. Is that even conscious of yourself? The process in our studio is all inclusive. Anything that comes along can have relevance. Some, you know, a movie I saw day before yesterday or something, something from cruising, cruising channels, something on the internet. So many things can come into the picture and I just invite them all in. I don't have a, I don't have a rigor about the rigor would be all inclusiveness. Anything can count here. Anything can enter into the, to the research, to the, to the flow of the project in conception. And I don't really, really anything out or have any tight methodology that's followed on each project in the same way.

It's always, always different, always shifting, moving around. It's a process of discovery that's so fantastic when it's really cooking. I mean, it's totally amazing. The National Palace Museum is an example of that in Taiwan. I had, it was kind of a fan of Asia, mainly Southeast Asia where I've done quite a bit of diving, scuba diving. But to, to have China, the panorama of China through the, the treasure of the Qing dynasty to be housed in a building and designing from the Forbidden City in Beijing to Taiwan just was opened up research possibilities that were phenomenal. One thing right early on we did was to look at filmmakers, Hussein in particular, the great Taiwanese filmmaker, who unlike Angli won't go Hollywood.

I respect Angli a lot and like his work, but some of his work with, Hussein is really hardcore and we looked at his movies. Goodbye South, goodbye, the Puppet Master, to understand contemporary since Taiwan's sensibility through an artist's vision. That coupled with trips to the Silk Road because the collections of the museum or Pan Asian and in character many of the objects and came from Silk Road Dialogue, artistic dialogue that traveled like a lightning rod to the Arabian Peninsula from China to the Mediterranean. So, I thought about Quentin Tarantino and how his fascination with, with fascination with manga and that kind of East West dialogue that you have and kill Bill I in particular. And I suggested in one of the galleries that we have projections of that movie, Uma in the courtyard wasting Lucy Liu in the projections on the wall of the 17th century gallery which is a gallery that talks about dialogue between the West and the East when perspective was introduced to China and the hand scrolls all changed in character.

I think went downhill myself. And the dialogue, the Chinoisechi phenomenon of, you know, fetishizing Chinese art and having it turn up in tears in Europe and all that 17th century. So, I think that, and I'm part of that dialogue too. You know, I'm an artist waiting in out of nowhere, coming out of the West, making what, developing my own take on China. So, I had to go out on the Silk Road and feel it. Go out there, draw, photograph, hang out in the areas like Dunhuang, the Mughal Caves, Turfana Wasis, the Tacoma Condesert, the Shinchon Mountains to feel all of that and understand that on the Silk Road these influences were, were so dynamic.

I mean, they were slow motion because it wasn't the jet age, but they were, it was a dynamic of exchange, a cultural exchange, artistic exchange, and mutation of, there's a blue and white, beautiful, blue and white vessel in the collection, but it has a farcey inscription on it. So that dialogue between Persian and China is really fascinating and it's kind of the subject of this museum which is different from the National Palace Museum. So those kinds of journeys to, so it all, so there's this ricocheting of stuff going on that, Tony, I'm going to get you my latest book, it's just out and there's a section in it called Nomadic Studio. It talks about kind of how the Studio works in an international sense and make sure I get you a copy of that. It's a really solely thing that's just out of press.

That, so the, the silking up information, so I'd be out in the Silk Road, you know, on a cell phone talking to Albuquerque or to Taipei and drawing and somebody's there with me photographing some site where the Silk Road passed through. Or I'm down in the cell, the Burma Road, Southern Branch of the Silk Road, in Dali, early Zhang, which are autonomous, have original or autonomous ethnic regions of China, where you wonder where the Chinese are and they're all, you know, they're all, I went to Tibet and I didn't know I was in Tibet. It wasn't Lassa, it was an extreme eastern fringe of the Tibet and Plato and so silking all that up, listening to the driver and the van playing, it's weird. Local bands in a, in a kind of remix stuff like Danger Mouse might do or in, in, in NERL's Barkley that his, his, his gorilla CD or his closet CD that he did that, that finally got out, the kind of remix and sampling and.

So all that really collapses in time and in ancient time, just how moving to go to the Great Wall, to go to the, to Xian, where the terracotta warriors were on earth and see predating or contemporary with that with those warriors, the sheen dynasty, giant hill, but it's a pyramid. It's a man made thing, but it looks like a gigantic hill, you know, that is thousands of years later, it's just become landscape. The Greatation of Architecture into Landscape, my theory that architecture is landscape and drag that was made popular by Vanity Fair, in a piece on me some time ago. The notion that landscape can, architecture can blur into landscape in New Mexico when you're right around, you see a original line, you think, well, that looks like a fortress, you know, all over the place.

Do you want to my, see one of my buildings in the landscape, what is that, is it really, I'm like doing, doing in silhouette, is it really a building, or is it a land form? That interests me a lot. So in our, in our, in the studio, we make collages, which are physical, paste up, coming from, probably originating my, my background in, as a painter, studio painter, early in my studies, I was very involved in that, drawing, drawing with oil pastels, till using oil, but they're pastels, making collage pieces that are big and spontaneous, and then collaging digitally, accumulating information, accumulating imagery. And when I say this, it probably sounds like film, you know, what, what you guys do, to some extent, it's not unlike that. You're living a project day to day, moment by moment, information, speeding in from, I like it when it comes in sort of sideways, or from the back, or you're not thinking too much, and moving into something conceptually to, you know, in a, in a direct intellectual fashion, but more, more of an openness ready for things to come into the process.

And come into the process and change course, if necessary, swerve one way or another, or another, and, I mean, you could see, you should see it sometime when there's a competition, charrette, you know, the term charrette we use, that charrette going on, all hell is breaking loose, right now it's very common team, if you call that messy. You want me to restate your questions? Because you're not going to, you wouldn't be in the, we wouldn't hear your voice, right? There's the question of where, when in the process, a building emerges, you know, there's a, there's a coalescence of a lot of activity.

And that could happen anytime, I could have, I mean, I could have, I have preconceptions, I'll see a site and I'll just think, you know, some, some, probably vague way that this kind of form just feels right here coming out of the site. And then the research will aid in a bit that, but it'll definitely be, could, can be part of, you know, their chance happens, chance operations happen. Without question, I invite them in, but at any point along the way, it isn't, it isn't though, it's, it isn't really a Gestalt where it's all adding, adding, adding, adding, adding, and okay, here it is. The thing could emerge two seconds after we start, you know, and then, or I start on a claim model, it could just become, could happen. Based on knowledge of the program that goes in the building and little blocks are cut out to make sure the scale of the model is correct and absorbs all the programmatic functional elements.

That could develop further down the line and there could be a, before going to research and, and understanding and letting chance, letting chance run and, and be one of the ingredients, process, process, ingredients, or the process could shift and become very, very, very focused and very rigorous. It's really hard to talk about it because it happens so differently every time. And I think that yields buildings are a really different one from the other. I can't see having a label about, you know, I think maybe people recognize things in my work that are, may, feelings that may have continuity with, you know, one project, project to the next, but I don't think there's an appearance that is. That predictable, there are certain things I do, earth to sky relationships, long sloping planes, things like that that, maybe you recur, but I think the process makes the buildings different.

You'll, the openness of the process. And there, you know, and I, when I talk about it, there are lots of examples of it. I've got a whole room full of, you know, rolls of collages and million drawings and anything you want to, you know, down the road, if this moves forward, that you want to dig into. I think when you call yourself an architect that there's a, there's a lot of baggage, good baggage that better be there. And I think there's some architecture that is called architecture that really is more, more about corporate success or a corporate vision than architecture as subject.

And I think, you know, the, the negative aspects of globalization are in such a great way formed by architecture. Buildings that where you wake up, the building wakes up over, you know, in China, it looks like it could have been in Columbus, Ohio, you know. Buildings that ways of practicing architecture that transfer ideas from one place to another in a way that is insulting to the place where the building is constructed. And I think that's just horrible. And you can, we can look around anywhere we go and understand which buildings that grow out of a place, New Mexico, you know, we can, anybody in New Mexico could rattle off any number of buildings that are over the place, period, Akuma.

The church at truchas, the church at Las Trampas, the church at Las Trampas, how the church at East Leta, the white church just sort of rides the village in such a beautiful way. The great walls of Canyon to Shay and then this tiny little detail down on the corner which is White House ruin. You know, things that are so anchored, so rooted, so beautifully. And then you, and then you look at the Albuquerque skyline, what can you say about that? What can you say about the downtown skyline? It has anything to do with this place.

The old First National Bank building, when I say old, in the 70s, it did attempt to be, to take the tower and, you know, lay it down and make a courtyard and make a building that has some specificity about the place where it was built. But how often do you see that? I mean, you could ask anyone can answer that themselves. You don't see it very often. Why not? You know, I don't know why not. If you're an architect, you're an architect, and I think you make things that are about, you know, I think they're different options. I think you could, I think someone could counter all this and say, hey, wait a minute, I'm just, you know, I'm building for a new world. And the kind of specificity you're talking about, Antoine is romantic. You forget about it, we're moving around, we're beyond that now. Well, I think you can be, you can be in the new world and, and as hip as possible in terms of technologies and at the same time, honor place.

And it isn't just about, you know, there's the, I think for me, it's poetically honoring a place when you do a building, poetically deriving a building from place, from sight, from culture, from whatever, from the road cut. And that's the reason. But then when you do that, it's sustainable. When I started out, we didn't have the S word sustainable, we didn't have green architecture. I think I thought of La Luce, my first project is, you know, ecological, ecological planning or some buzzword I invented. Because it was about the site and grooving the site with integrity. And when you, so when you are site specific, then you're, you're thinking about where the winds are coming from, where the, what the sun angles are doing, how they're impacting your, what you're making. Then it becomes sustainable. And there's an ethos that goes along with that. So that's a good thing, you know, in a whacked out energy situation that we're in.

So that's how I work. Are there other, there must be other things that you admire or do are doing it for sustainable, organic, in a way, like the thought you found through the solution that people would put into the building. Well, there's, I think there's an international cadre of architects that work, work with the place and mind and feel it and express it and devote the place very deeply and Glenn Merkett in Australia as one of them.

Tadau Ando in Japan. Kingokuma in Japan. It's great European architects. Peter Zumpthor. This country, Rick Joy. Will Bruder in the Southwest. Really important work that is time traveling between now, you know, contemporary materials that are available and deeper desert issues. Stephen Hall's work is very interesting very much. We're going non-probably. Some architects in South Africa that did, that are in Durban, did this amazing lodge and Kruger National Park where my, my wife and I went recently for a, to finally go to Africa and see the animals.

It's amazing lodge that just honors the site but then transforms it in this use of materials and see, you don't, you don't have to be, that's the whole thing, the architects I've named. You don't have to be cornea and nostalgic or acute to remind someone how special a place is. And we know in New Mexico that we've got a lot of cutification. Santa Fe is an example of cutification. Take Santa Fe in totality. I love it. I'm like any other tourist. I go up there. I love it. I love its continuities. I love the true buildings that like over on a Sikya Madre. Some of those, some of the older homes over there. Some of the old parts of town. You know, a lot about those is, you know, the Museum of Flanarts is a copy of a chicken wire pavilion for us for an expo in San Diego from 1917.

It was chicken wire in Stucco and they're the one in Santa Fe's brick with the brick chop to make it look like a road at Adobe. And then Stucco, I did an addition and a renovation of that building. I know it very well. So there's a lot of deception in areas where you think that the architecture is authentic and derives from the place. Put it, you know, it's fake. But then fake is okay. I mean, in my, in my cosmology, I like good fake stuff too. But I don't, I don't want to do it. I did, I did a hotel I called Atlantis in Las Vegas. I guess that was fake because it wasn't really Atlantis. But I imagine by some tectonic aberration Atlantis had crept underneath the desert, the desert of the Great Southwest and erupted with fusion energy blasting out of it.

Now the desert floor. So where do you see your architecture going down the desert? Something you want to explore more in terms of what you're doing or places you want to work or anything or how you still pretty wide open every project. My architecture, headed thoughts I have about what I would like to do. I never think about that at all. I just think I just follow the trail of discovery project to project. I don't have any goals or ambitions. I like working in all different places. Right now, I'm, I'm considering a project an island off the coast of Chile.

About a third of the way up from paddock from the, from Tierra del Fuego, from the, from our Punta Arenas, the tip of Chile. And, and I, a house on an island in Miami. I like diversity of site. They, they just bring out the best. They bring out, you know, new possibilities every time. New research, new encounters with people from other parts of the world. I think if I had a game plan, it would be to continue to do to get around as much as possible internationally and keep working like I'm doing now. But I don't have any kind of dream scenario, you know, some project or at all. I just follow follow my nose. We've been following that. We were talking before about some of these influences. And, and in a specific way.

Travel has obviously influenced it. But, can you talk over about the concept of travel in general? And, you talk several times about, you know, trail discovery, trying to turn things into travel. Obviously, it's, you know, for what you do. Well, I like motion. Travel is motion. Wedding motorcycle is motion. Rollerblading, skiing, things I love to do are all about motion and the body and space. And, some people have sand in their shoes. You know, there's that cliche. They've, they've traveled to travel. They're nomadic. And I, I'm that way. I've always been that way. But it's curious that since, since I am nomadic, I've chosen New Mexico is definitely as my, and chosen it. It chose me as, as my, for my spiritual home.

I can't imagine ever leaving here. I'm always having it as a base to return to. But, travel motion. It all inspires me. I love jet airplanes. I love flying on jet airplanes. Travel is in the negative for me. It's viewing the earth from the skies. You know, it's like a, it's like an amusement park ride. I always choose a window seat. I can't stand aisle seats. Because when I'm flying, I always think that I'm connected to what's going by below. More than I am, what's going on inside the plane. So the kin, the kinesthetic sensibility we all have.

Some of us manifest it different. More than others is really strong in my, in my makeup. Have you ever imagined or envisioned a project that just can't be built yet? I might be working on one. I might be working on a project right now that may not ever be built, because there's always budget hanging around. It's not like being a studio painter or there's no budget. Well, relatively speaking. Yeah. You know, in almost every project, there's a, the vision doesn't match the budget necessarily. And you have to work it till it does. That's part of being an architect.

You can't just say, well, you know, with some architects, I guess, get away with it. You know, this is what it's going to take. You know, fish or cut bait. But I'm not in that situation. I haven't been in that situation. I've always, I've always have to figure a budget out. Is there something that, regardless of budget that you, has your head that just, you can't build it now. Yeah, yeah, diaphanus membranes that have intelligence that were images and digital information can be pumped through them. I'm trying to think if there's anything that I've ever done that just isn't real. Where there's no, it's undoable because of technology or whatever, not, not even, not even budget just technology. And, and, yeah, like diaphanus membranes that are spatially, they're like a great, Ray Bradbury short story where they're psychotropic.

They change with a psychological makeup of the inhabitants and they have environmental responses and, and, and spatial responses that are, you know, I think of wacky stuff like that. But I don't know, I don't take the thoughts very far. Yeah, there are things that come up that mainly having to do with making a membrane that is chameleon-like. And the technology will be there for that. It probably is there already in certain esoteric highly funded government projects around the world. I don't know, but military projects, but technologies to do those kinds of things I imagine are not there for me yet. Tell me about, we've just briefly talked about last time, but tell me more about your first interest in Israel.

Spain, was before Italy. When I graduated from Columbia University after having gone to UNM, I had a fellowship to go to Spain. That was, I wanted to set the pace of that by taking a freighter to Portugal from here in Brooklyn and not just fly over there. And I wanted to understand the distance planetary distance between continents and spend a week on a boat and the freighter going across. And then, that was my first trip to Europe, obviously, and landing in Portugal and taking a train to Spain. Spain was my subject area for my state in Europe.

But I immediately dropped some of my stuff off and then continued to general to buy a L'embreta motor scooter. It was a pretty hot ride when it was 175, and it would do a 75-ratey miles an hour. And then I decided to travel from Genoa to France to Paris and then drive from Paris to Istanbul on a motor scooter. So I went across the Alps again down to the tip of Italy. And Italy, I remember, I remember Italy, I'll come back to Italy when I lived there later as a as a Rome prize fellow in the 80s. But at first trip, I just loved Italians. I mean, from the second second I got there and loved that amazing sensibility. And they could make anything from some sensational ducati to shoes and would never farm it out to anybody else.

You know, they had to make it themselves, including that motor scooter I was on, which is really a great little machine. And then from Brindisi went, took the ferry through the Corinth Canal to Perreus and into the Greek islands and the Peloponnese and then up to Thessaloniki across through Kavala to Istanbul. And I wanted to just cover ground that way. Kind of collapse time. All those things were for me, subjects of architectural history courses, seeing these buildings firsthand. It's amazing things and having rocks thrown at me by little tricky shepherd kids who thought I was some kind of UFO and this weird, looking motor scooter they've never seen before. And I'm kind of on a freighter to from Istanbul to Naples and then back to Spain.

And then Spain was my point of focus. And Tony Link, Spain and Italy are two discussions. You mentioned Italy. You want me to jump over there? Do you want me to? Yeah. As I traveled, I drew all the time and I had different drawing media. There was a repitograph pen, which is a pen that you learn to use as an architecture student. But then my other medium were, were sticks or twigs I'd find or popsicle sticks I wittle to make a drawing instrument from. A lot of my drawings were with a stick or a bird feather. And I just carried a bottle of India ink and my pet, my sketch pad. So I drew a lot and I thought that that experimental use of media was good for me because it shook up my habit, you know, drawing habits.

And I would draw differently depending on what I found on the ground or what I had in my pocket. So I drew all the time, I kept a journal for my Columbia project. I needed to report back to them occasionally to tell them what I was up to. But really, I was just cruising and learning, especially looking at vernacular architecture, which has a has much more authentic natural responses to site than more monumental buildings, which tend to be more of a genre with amazing regional and cultural nuances. So I looked at, I focused on vernacular on houses and, I go, excuse me. So I focused on houses and agrarian structures, you know, anonymous kind of structures and looked at how they recited and how they, how they felt on the land.

And that, I kept, you know, from being from New Mexico, I'd already lived in New Mexico seven years before going to New York. I think in New Mexico, I thought, well, when I go to Spain, it would be kind of like New Mexico maybe because Mexico was Spanish. And what a different ballgame. What a tortilla is in Spain. It's an omelet. It's like a free tata in Italy. It's not a tortilla. And I understood that that the indigenous ad mixture in the new world just turned every turn the Spanish sensibility around. There were remote villages in northern New Mexico that I remember traveling in the 60s where you'd find people who had never been to Santa Fe and were really look like Spaniards when I came back.

Viejas, older women, dressed in black, similar kind of shawls and could have been from Spain. But in general, especially Mexico, you see the ad mixture of exuberance. And when I sailed back from Spain to Veracruz on another freighter with my little, my little brother, learning in Veracruz, the exuberance, the music, the, you know, the tortillas, everything so different. So I got that there, even though that there was a, you know, the conquest might have been in reverse where the Spanish were conquered spiritually by. Most people that they presume to conquer. And that was a big lesson for me. But being in living in Spain was extraordinary. The drawing them on the move all the time, the dealing with nasty weather out in the open. On a little bike.

It was an amazing experience for me. And it made, you know, it was because I was traveling in quite inclement weather. Spain can have in the winter there. I really earned the drawings. I felt like I earned those drawings and somehow got it done. And, you know, in the weather and the traveling light accumulated a whole, a whole cosmology of Spain through the drawings I made. Notebook was kind of a diary I kept. Anything else about that? You want to talk about it? Italy was another big deal for me. I mean, you mentioned Italy. But that was later. I mean, I.

All right. Tell me about your second fellowship or. In 1985, I got the. I was nominated for the Rome Prize to go to the American Academy in Rome. And work for a good part of the year. And I got the, I got it. And it was in 1985. I had. I had done a lot of lose here in New Mexico. And I had done some work on some branch banks. And I think the red blood bank was, was designed and. And it was kind of a low. It was a perfect, it was perfect timing because my practice wasn't really rolling that.

So I did that. I went to Rome. And when you go there, you have your, it's in the American Academy. It's on the Janicola, which is above Trastevere, across the Tiber from. Most, most of the monuments like the Pantheon and. Different Roman buildings. And you're up there in this kind of rarefied world of an upper level studio looking out across the skyline of Rome. Living there, working there day to day and being able to get out on the streets. I did when, when I went there, I thought, okay, I've got to. I think at that time, you could get, there was some of the first.

You call that super eight, the little video, first video cameras that they're big and clunky. I had a Kodak. It's about that big. It's a video camera and with little cassettes of this size. Is that super eight? Huh? I need a video. I don't know. Yeah, without that big. So anyway, I decided I've never had any experience with. I always like movies and thought we thought I want to make movies, you know, sometime. I've never had any experience. And with it. So I decided to take to get one. It's part of my stipend. I bought one. I bought this camera. And it was determined to do that, draw, you know, everything possible. Study in the time I had there. So I made an Andy Warhol kind of movie where it went on and on and on just shooting. I might inflict that on you sometime. It's just unedited footage of me screwing around in Rome.

I mean, it's really fun. Some of the things in monumental in buildings you'd never get to see, you know, because I had. When you're there, you have a special special permit to go places to monumental buildings and get get on the inside. So you're all kinds of stuff in that. I became fascinated with dead Vespas, I call them around Rome. There are piles of Vespas, Vespacarnage. Carcasses of Vespas and Lambretta's that people have stripped everything off of and they tended for some reason, end up in piles. I know exactly where those piles are. I mean, every time we go back to Rome, I make sure that that pile is still there. And Rione Pinia. I know there's this definitely one to go to. And so you find those kinds of things and then you find, and there'll be this foot, you know, four feet long. It was part of a colossal statue of Tiberius. And then the dead Vespas. So I, and then I like, I was fascinated with how Italians wash their cars at fountains. Like in the...

Piazza San Pietro in front of St. Peter's. The big arcing, colonnade by Bernini. Where you see it all the, you know, anytime they see the popes in there. They used to just drive out there and wash their cars on those fountains, you know, splash water off and wash it and feed it. So I got interested in the underbelly of Rome, as well as the monument, the monumental Rome, and I reveled in both. So I was completely outbeating the bushes all the time with my video camera. Another one I liked was Italian male crotch adjustment. They're always doing that. You know, you're one. And things, I had a little subtext I would explore. And Italian body language in my video, my homemade video. And at the same time, I'm drawing all these buildings. I did, I don't know. I published a book of drawings from my catchbooks, Pastel and Ink drawings.

That, by then, I'm using a brush pen, which is a no cleanup pen that has a cap on it. And you just draw with a brush, like a, like an Indian, like, you know, calligraphy. And I'm drawing that way and using past oil pastels for color, drawing black and white or fusion of pastel and ink brush drawings. While I'm doing my video, I kind of had everything with me all the time. Since, you know, in case something would come up, I have my camera with me. So I was learning Italian out on the streets. And going all around Rome, but then also taking trips. We'd go and field trips to Venice or to Florence, Tuscany, to South toward Naples. And we kind of go, I'll take off whenever we have the urge.

And the wheels to do it. And what got me about that was how alive Rome, the Roman epoch, is, how vivid it is. There'll be the ruin of an aqueduct that, again, looks like landscape. It's playing out, you know, landscape and drag theory that it's now become kind of geology, some fragment of an aqueduct, turning up slammed carbon into some newer building in Rome, my newer meaning, you know, like medieval or Renaissance. The best. So we have this feeling of time collapse all the time of Rome being haunted by the ancient presence. But totally Filini, you know, at the other end, completely Filini. He didn't have to try that hard, you know, you think he how wacky Filini was. All you have to do is walk out the street in Rome and start, you know, turn the camera on, point it around, and you've got a Filini movie. I went to this one amazing castle in the Coli Albani, the mountain, the Low Hills south of Rome, where there was a contest of the noble families, you know, outdoing one another with the villas they would build.

And one of them was Mondragone. It's monumental, kind of scary villa with these long quarters. And I walked in and went in there, and it had been a voice academy, you know, long-sense converters who other uses from the noble dwelling. And they were blue books like, you know, exam books, blowing around in the wind, and there are chickens living in there. Filini movie, right? I walk in and there's these blue books blown around, open down the corridors, and chickens squawking and racing hell and running away from us inside this building. You know, every time you turn around, there was something weird thing like that. And then Nero's pleasure boat, there's a place called Lago de Nemi. It's this little lake up in the Coli Albani, these hills.

And Nero had made a pleasure boat that was just sat in the lake, you know, just his fantasy of what a boat would be, what a party boat would be. I never realized what a party animal Nero was until I read the accounts of this boat, which had been somehow floated and put in some storage buildings on exhibit. And the Germans, when they accidentally had blown them up, so you read the accounts, and he went to Nero's Domus Aurea, the golden house of Nero, and he had panels in the ceiling. It would drop down and rose petals would float down on his guests on the back of the aisle below. So he was, I realized what an ultimate bad boy he was, horrible, tyrant.

But at the same time, he did this amazing out there, surreal stuff. So it's like Fellini surrealism and the other new, new realist filmmakers. And documentaries of Italian life, I mean, it had always gone on. It wasn't like this isn't just now. They're always weirdo projects that were going on in Italy. But I don't know, I just became, I kind of a convert from loving Spain, you know, living breathing Spain, the Spain of Garcia Lorca, which is still totally alive in me, to the Spain of, I mean, to the Italy of Fellini and the Roman Empire, you know, head on collision. I could go on and on about Italy. I mean, it is just an endless deal.

Eating and shopping, you know, that whole subject, discovering Parmigiano Reggiano, huge discovery of my life. I saw this light up in Toulouse one time when I was up there ski, ski trip and weighing the distance and I, it was doing some strange things and I can't say it was UFO. I honestly, I would say no, I haven't seen one. I can't, I can't honestly say that. Hell yeah. Do I want to see a UFO? Yeah. I'm not sure that light was winter not. I saw in Toulouse. There were a lot of cattle mutilations going on at that time up there. So in one of the local drivers up there said that regularly they'd go out with six packs and whiskey and watch them over in the BLM, BLM land across the Gorge. And they'd go hang there and it was a base.

This seemed like a very normal guy that told me this. It didn't seem like any wack or anything. And then John McFee and Basin and Range, this is a Princeton scholar and celebrated author, his book Basin and Range, clinically described society. So, you know, they're out there. What's your fascination? I like time travel. I like going to deepest geologic time. My fascination with outer space and UFOs is like anything else. You know, just I'm also fascinated with new, my new running shoes. I got gel kinses. So it isn't like, oh, probably UFOs are something big for me. It's just everything interesting. And so I like to think of deepest time going out to space. When you're on a site. You don't draw the line at the surface of the earth. You imagine what's out there beyond it.

And how your building can can be in resonance with the whole thing. Imagine realms beyond. So extraterrestrials were part of that. It'll be a deal. A couple of lines for the song. I'll stand on the ocean until I start thinking that I'll know my song well before it starts singing. Well, Ellen Ginsburg, the lyric from Bob Dylan's song, I'll stand on the edge of the ocean until I start singing. But I'll know my song well before I start singing that line. But I know my song, but I'll know my song well before I start singing.

Ellen Ginsburg in Scorsese documentary talks about that as, hey, this is where the baton got passed from the beat poets to some other generation. They didn't know what that generation was going to be. And they felt that Bob Dylan received the baton and in his early work was an extension was the next step. And I think that when you say, and I'll know my song well before I start singing, means you're not going to bullshit. You can know your song well before you start singing. And you can... And I can extrapolate from it. I know my well and the Dylan lyric. I can extrapolate from the Dylan lyric.

I can extrapolate from the Bob Dylan lyric. Something like Howard Hughes now, an aviator. He's got OCD. Just watch that again last night on HD. You see that one? Probably repeated himself all the time. So we got to watch me. I might do the same. So when you take the Bob Dylan lyric, and I'll know myself, when you take the Bob Dylan lyric, when I... And I'll know my song well before I start singing, I can extrapolate that to my process. Knowing our song well, our collective song will in my studio, means understanding sight, clients, the aura of architecture that surrounds the project at hand. And the research, the penetration of subject, of sight, of psyche, as a big accumulation of process. It's like that lyric. And I'll know my song well before I start singing.

What could it mean to you at the time of a point that you used to call out these types of situations? Well, I was a child of the 60s and you know how it felt. And here's a voice coming out of nowhere, out of a... After traveling across country from New Mexico on a motorbike and lying in New York, having just returned from Spain, up through Vera Cruz, Mexico, up through Albuquerque and Austin, Texas, up to New York. And this song, hard rains are going to fall coming on from a local station. I never heard anything like that in my life. I've never heard anybody sing that way. I've never heard a song with that kind of message. I don't think we had the term blew my mind yet. That was later in the 60s. But that's what it did. I heard that.

And I don't know how it affected me or changed me, but it's definitely an ingredient. It didn't mean the purpose of the game, but it was very starting. Bye.