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V5: What have been the rewards of practicing architecture?
AL: Architecture really has to do with solving problems and analysis. It has some of the implications of chess, and some of the implications of a story by Arthur Conan Doyle. It also has to do with a scientific system of understanding information. Those are satisfactions that people usually seek independent of their profession, and architecture just happens to include some of these - the most basic methods of finding out about the reasons for things. The intellectual satisfaction is very important. The endless variety that occurs, new sites, new clients and new programs. It's always a new problem.
V5: Have any other types of professions or work interested you?
AL: When I was young I guess - there's this joke about the first Jewish president. His mother is invited to the inauguration and she doesn't want to come, even though her son is President. But the President tells her, I'll bring you up on Air Force One. So she's sitting there at the inauguration and turns to the person in the next seat and says, "My other son's a doctor!" So my mother thought I should have been a doctor...
From an early age I was interested in something that had to do with my
hands, and drawing, and building things. I was always good at math. Architecture has to do with analyses and subjectivity.
Most people talk about the other sides of architecture, but I'm a fiend for the kind of thinking that leads to extraordinary things because you're objective. Not that leads to boxes because you're objective, but which leads to extraordinary things. In architecture school there are always professors who will say, "Why did you do that? Tell me why you did that." And the answer basically is, "Tell me what's wrong about it!" Most people say a form should be based on some logic, but that's absolutely wrong. The organization of the building should be based on some logic, and some other parts, but the building can have wings and colors and anything if that does not affect the other parts of the building which are logic-based. People are generally arguing for logic and for minimal spaces, they just want to make things as neat and regular and square, and with as little character, as possible. The rest of the world is just making these extraordinary things, because aesthetics isn't the dominant notion. It is sort of interesting how that makes everybody so restrictive in their creativity, because they don't know how to process information! Termites are famous for making neat buildings, and neatness is okay. But that is what they are famous for, and that is all they see - anything else that differs from this neatness they can't see at all. It's like a religious model where if you're doing this and you are doing that you are going to get to heaven for sure!
V5: By "neat" do you mean "tidy," something that suggests that it's under control?
AL: Forms that look like they subjugate the evils. It's okay to have a notion of subjugating evils, that's very useful. But when that's what produces the correctness of a physical thing there is a problem. In many cases it's a matter of their being concerned about criticism. Mies has a great line, which he used in a different way, but it's: "I don't want to be interesting, I want to be good." Mies is very Catholic in his attitudes: you get to heaven if you don't make mistakes. The thing about not making mistakes is that it leads you to make boxes. If you think that getting to heaven is something different from that, you have to do good things: like Le Corbusier.
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