The bones of my architecture are very much related to the structure, to the physical fact of how a building can stand up; it’s also related to geometry and a certain understanding of the architecture in which there is a balance between expression and function.
I grew up in a modernist house, in a modernist culture. There was a love for modernism everywhere – the furniture, the books, the food, even the cutlery. So I learned very early to appreciate the value of design and the value of architecture.
One of the dilemmas of architecture in general is that there is a Catch-22 – you can’t actually get to be commissioned to do certain types of building until you’ve already built that type of building. So it seems to be incredibly hard to get going.
I was studying architecture at Berkeley when my father passed away in 2007. We knew he had cancer, but we didn’t expect it to escalate so rapidly. In my mind, it was like, ‘He’ll pull through.’ When he didn’t, I didn’t understand. I was 21, and my best friend had died.
I was born and spent my first five years in Chester, an ancient city that retains some of its Roman walls and fortifications and contains a great medieval cathedral, as well as Tudor, Stuart and early 19th century architecture. Visiting these things was free, and my parents – who had little money – made the most of this.
I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.
To go back to architecture, what’s organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale.
In the United States alone, 450 billion square feet of glass facade is produced every year. What if we could take this chance to use the glass to harness solar energy and allow the architecture to respond to the light and heat of the sun, to create photosynthesis and generate solar energy?
I attended classes and taught classes, in Food Anthropology at Pace University, with an anthropology professor. You can trace history by the architecture and food of a place. Food is one of those things that transcends and stays in the culture.
Quebec City is the most European of any city in North America; they speak French all the time. There is a part of town called Old Quebec which is really like being in France. The architecture is just gorgeous, food, shopping. I’d say Quebec City is the most beautiful city in North America I’ve seen.
The ‘International Style of Modernism’ came with the advent of building services. In the end, the architecture became like a container space, essentially like a boring box with a basement full of machinery to make it inhabitable. As a result, buildings literally started to look identical all over the planet.
I always wanted to be an actor, but I always loved design, and growing up in New Orleans there was such great style, great architecture. I would decorate my little apartment in New York over and over again, because it only had a couple of rooms. And I did it for friends and family on the side just for fun.
If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it’s similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity.
I’ve always been interested in an architecture of resistance – architecture that has some power over the way we live. Working under adversarial conditions could be seen as a plus because you’re offering alternatives. Still, there are situations that make you ask the questions: ‘Do I want to be a part of this?’
If you look at the Earth without architecture, it’s sometimes a little bit unpleasant. So there is this basic human need to do shelter in the broadest sense of the word, whether it’s a movie theater or a simple log cabin in the mountains. This is the core of architecture: To provide a space for human beings.
You get one chance to do something about native title. You get perhaps one chance in your life to do something about a republic. You get one chance, your chance, to build a piece of the political architecture in the Pacific. I wasn’t going to give those up.
Inherent in architecture, it involves everything in life so that there is absolutely no end to it. By the time you’re seventy or eighty, you’re still beginning. So, that’s the kind of life I’ve preferred to being the expert at forty and dead, you know.
I used to think that the great thing about sculpture was that, like Stonehenge, it was something that stood against time in an adamantine way, and was an absolute mass in space. Now I try to use the language of architecture to redescribe the body as a place.
New York is just an energy. There’s a beauty to the way it’s laid out: the architecture, the way the planning is. It’s huge, but you really do get to experience more than your own existence here. It’s kinda hard to isolate yourself from different types of people, different types of ideas or communities.
‘Station to Station’ came out of a sense of urgency – a sense that culture, be it art, film or architecture, has become so compartmentalised. For this project, we wanted to break that and create a language that is more nomadic and less materialistic and really empowering for the creators and the audience.
The original Heart logo was made back in the real early ‘70s by Mike Fisher, who I used to be in a relationship with. He was first our manager and then our soundman. When I met him, he was in design school for architecture, so he was always drawing.
I’ve spent a lot of very happy times in Edinburgh as a result of playing virtually every festival since 1996. It’s also a beautiful city in its own right, is walkable, within sight of the sea and mountains – and was too far north for the Luftwaffe to have done any damage, hence the spectacularly beautiful architecture.
About 1998, when ‘Wide World of Sports’ and the ‘Footy Show’ came to an end for me, I couldn’t type. When I started architecture, it was a very aesthetic, creative, an almost art process, where lettering and thick line were how you expressed yourself on the paper.
Itjtawy was ancient Egypt’s capital for over four hundred years, at a period of time called the Middle Kingdom about four thousand years ago. The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt, and the site is really important because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion.
I like to be surrounded by books. My wife Evelyn has a Ph.D. in comparative literature, so we have a lot of her Spanish and German literature books which are wasted on me, plus a lot of novels and books on art and architecture shared by us both. Evelyn used to edit an art magazine called ‘FMR,’ so we have a common interest in design.
