Seeing the Mall fully activated, fully full, democratically so, tearful and hopeful, was an inspiration. The meaning of the Mall’s monuments, those enduring symbols of the nation’s aspirations, sacrifice, and hope for change, was renewed during these last several days–it was great to see them in action.

Given Obama’s interest in architecture, let’s hope that he illuminates the profound connection that exists between our quality of life and the places we inhabit. Here’s a brief recap of presidential architectural forays written by David Brussat for the Providence Journal. Aside from his comments about Daniel Libeskind (Dave and I have agreed to disagree on some contemporary structures), this is a fascinating read.

“BARACK OBAMA spilled the beans at a campaign rally last March 21, in Salem, Ore.: “I can tell you that when I was young I wanted to be an architect, but, um, I . . . [shout from offstage] . . . That was good! Architect of change! I like that!”

If only Obama had not been interrupted by that blockhead, we might know what sort of architect he would have been. Maybe, if we are really lucky and Obama really is smart, we can have not only change we can believe in but change we can see.

Today, many Americans are dissatisfied with their built environment. Obama must try to change architecture from the modernism of the past half a century to a new traditionalism for the future. Is he likely to do so? The tea leaves give us few clues.

On the one hand, given the chance to frame the backdrop of his acceptance speech in Denver last August, Obama chose a classical stage set. He took some ribbing for its supposed pomposity, and classicists furrowed their brows at the colonnade’s prefab clunkiness. But the set contributed to the exaltation of what was then the apogee of his career.

Furthermore, in 2004, when the Obamas wanted to upgrade from a condo to a house, he and Michelle bought a Georgian Revival built in 1910. It was located by his wife, who was a member of the board of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks.

On the other hand, Obama once attended a lecture (or so claims the lecturer) by Daniel Libeskind, a modernist known for buildings that look like they are about to fall down. If Obama did attend a Libeskind lecture, maybe it was just for laughs.

Let us hope so. Since Thomas Jefferson designed Monticello, the Virginia State Capitol at Richmond and the original buildings of the University of Virginia, no president but Franklin Roosevelt has shown much interest in architecture aside from the occasional monument or federal building. FDR designed a modest hideaway on his Hyde Park estate called Top Cottage in 1939, and several buildings in Dutchess County, N.Y., and Warm Springs, Ga. Other than Jefferson, FDR is the only U.S. president known to have designed a house of his own.

One of FDR’s most enduring legacies has to do with architecture. Among the more notable of his New Deal agencies, the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, designed thousands of post offices, bridges and other structures in traditional styles that ignored the emerging craze for the International Style (early modernism). Many of them survive today because of the intrinsic structural and aesthetic merits of traditional over modern architecture. Its merits represent a sustainability whose resurrection would be much more effective at addressing climate change than the high-tech “gizmo green” fad that is favored by the architecture profession.

The federal government was the last major institution of American society to shift from traditional to modern architecture. Corporate, collegiate and institutional America went first. While the classicism of the Lincoln Memorial (1922) was uncontroversial, that of the Jefferson Memorial (1941) was attacked by modernists then on the rise in the profession. The last major federal buildings of classical style were erected by FDR during the 1930s. Tuesday’s inaugural parade passed them on the way up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.

The presidential motorcade also passed the first major federal building built in a classical style since then: the Ronald Reagan Building (1998). In fact, the grace of Pennsylvania Avenue arises from the City Beautiful movement, launched by the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Obama’s own Chicago.

The worst building on Pennsylvania is the J. Edgar Hoover Building, FBI headquarters, designed in a Brutalist style similar to that of Boston City Hall. If Obama has the eye of an aesthete, as anyone who claims he originally wanted to be an architect surely must, he probably turned his eye from the FBI building to the Department of Justice (1935), a classical building right across the street. If Obama wants to doff his cap to FDR, let him revive New Deal classicism. That would not only create many thousands of jobs, but a physical symbol of the Obama administration to which the public could easily relate.

Three blocks north of the White House is K Street, Lobbyists Row, the worst concentration of modern architecture in the nation’s capital. Part of Obama’s agenda is to push America’s body politic away from K Street toward Pennsylvania Avenue. Using architecture to tell the good guys from the bad guys might help him surmount the predictable resistance.

It is possible that change of great magnitude will want an aesthetic component. It might need a symbolism capable of representing its spirit to the public. Jefferson understood the importance of having an architecture that reflects the nation’s aspirations. Obama should embrace his inner architect by initiating a national conversation about architecture. If he does, he will do far more for his country than he could ever have done as an architect.”

-David Brussat, Providence Journal, January 22, 2009

Inspirational speaker Nicole Johnson uses my book, Churches, to deliver a powerful message of hope for everyone who feels invisible and taken for granted. I don’t know Nicole, but what she took away from Churches and how she brought the lessons of the Gothic cathedral builders to bear on today’s problems, blew me away. Watch, and be inspired! For more on Nicole, visit Fresh Brewed Life, hope for the daily grind.

Building a bridge is a monumental undertaking, and there is something inherent in projects of this size and scope that makes people want to participate in their creation. In the case of the sleek, new I-35W crossing over the Mississippi that opened in Minneapolis this week, Twin City residents engaged in a day-long discussion that determined aspects of the bridge’s design, eighteen hundred schoolchildren made mosaic tiles that adorn the bridge, and thousands watched in wonder as this heroic ten-lane highway bridge rose, incredibly, in eleven short months. To celebrate the bridge and spirit of collaboration, FIGG, the bridge’s designer and engineer of record, has published Bridging the Mississippi: The New I-35W Bridge.  Rich with color photos, plans, and graphics, the book provides a step-by-step overview for the general reader of the bridge’s design, planning, and construction. All book proceeds will be donated to two Minneapolis organizations that further the cause of education.  For more information, and to order the book ($20 plus shipping), visit FIGG.

Note: The complete interview with Nick Benson appears in Monuments: Life in Memory.

JD: How much stone cutting did the World War II Memorial involve?

NB: There are 4,682 letters in total—a lot of lettering—in twenty-two inscription locations. The letters vary in size from three-quarters of an inch tall to more than 19 inches.

JD: What kind of granite was used?

NB: It’s a North Carolina granite called Kershaw. One of the reasons [memorial designer] Friedrich St. Florian chose it is because it has an incredibly large grain. Even from a distance, you can see the character of the granite. Finer granite, especially with such large, bold architectural forms, would get lost.
JD: Will the lettering be stained?

NB: Yes. The stain is painted into the interior of each letter with a brush, very pain-stakingly. The stain penetrates the stone, but is transparent so that you can see the quality of the granite through the stain itself. It’s important not to turn this three-dimensional sculptural form into typography. You want these inscriptions to be beautiful, sculptural elements that will partake of the architecture scale of the monument, so you can’t think of the lettering graphically—black on white. Which is what everyone does today. Big mistake.

JD: Do people read inscribed letters as they would text in a book?

NB: They do. The key thing about carved letters in stone, what’s called the “lapidary letter,” is its sculptural quality.

JD: What cuts do you ordinarily use?

NB: I mostly always use V-cut. There are many different types of cuts. People have done all kinds of crazy things—square cuts, pillowed bottoms, double-edge cuts—with the interior treatments of the letter. But, again, you have to do what’s going to work best with the monument. The same goes for the letter design. The actual process of carving the stone is not a terribly difficult skill to learn. You can become a competent carver in three or four years, a fine carver in one or two, but a very good carver in three or four years. The difficulty is in the design of the letter itself.

JD: How do you move forward in a situation where a single mistake can be fatal?

NB: That’s where the skill comes in. You have to know what you’re doing. You’re taking out such small amounts of stone at any given time that it’s not as if you’re going to mistroke and blow out the center of an O. It doesn’t work that way. The strike of the piston and hammer against the chisel is fairly light, and you’re taking off small bits at a time.

JD: How long have you been cutting stone?

NB: Twenty years. My dad taught me. He got me into the shop more than twenty years ago. I started in 1979. I was fifteen and needed a summer job. I wasn’t interested in taking over the family business. My father was hard on me and got me moving quickly, making finished work for him, and carving at the shop level which is a particularly high level of craftsmanship. He has the highest standards of anybody you’re going to find, bar none.

JD: When you look at a block of text are you conscious of individual letters or the entire composition?

NB: Both.

JD: Which comes up first?

NB: The entire composition is key, but the proportion of the letter, the design of the particular letter form itself, is extremely important too. Equally important is the cadence of the text, how the negative space is used, word spacing, line spacing—all of that is absolutely crucial to good inscriptional carving. And very complicated and subtle. That’s the type of thing that people don’t see. The inscription will be easy to read, the letters will look pretty, and they won’t give it a second thought.

JD: When it’s done well, stone cutting is invisible. Do you think of it as art or craft?

NB: I’m an artisan, not a fine artist. I am practicing a very specific craft. In the realm of that craft, there is a certain amount of leeway for artistic interpretation within relatively specific rules. The inscription work on this monument was made to be highly legible, easily read, with no strange idiosyncrasies that would have people scratching their heads and wondering.

JD: My son, who is studying Chinese, told me that in China if a woman has a choice between a handsome man and one who writes beautifully, she will always choose the man with the beautiful handwriting.

NB: I’m not surprised. They’ve got such a reverence for calligraphy over there, and everyone has some skill with the brush. People here appreciate calligraphy, but it doesn’t receive the same reverence. Maybe at some point, people will start studying penmanship again. Wouldn’t that be nice?

JD: Do you judge people based on their handwriting?

NB: Not at all, because when I was a kid, my handwriting was atrocious, nearly illegible.

JD: What happened?

NB: Study, study, study and perseverance. Hermann Zapf, the great type designer, said, “My friends would go out and drink and dance while I stayed at home and bravely drew letter form.” You’ve got to put in the time.

From an esthetic standpoint [the Sunshine Skyway Bridge] may well rank as the most impressive piece of large-scale bridge design in this country in half a century.

-Paul Goldberger, October 16, 1988, New York Times

Completed in 1987, the bridge’s 1,200-foot (366 m)-long span is the world’s longest cable-stayed precast concrete span. In its entirety, including the side spans and approaches, the bridge is 21,878 feet (6,668 m) long and crosses 4.1 miles (6.6 km) of Tampa Bay. It carries I-275, part of the Eisenhower Interstate System that celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2006. Twin 40-foot (12 m)-wide roadways run on either side of the brilliant yellow cables and provide unobstructed views of the water. The roadways for the bridge’s upper level are constructed of 330 95-foot (29 m)-wide precast concrete segments that are threaded with high-strength steel cables. This precast superstructure, in addition to being economical, provides continuous structural lines that contribute to the bridge’s graceful appearance. The twenty-one steel cables that support the roadway are splayed out in rows from two slender central pylons which soar 242 feet (74 m) above the deck. The cables are attached to every other deck segment, with each cable supporting two segments on either side of a pylon.

The award-winning Sunshine Skyway Bridge makes clear the feasibility and economy of long-span cable-stayed bridges. In linking the communities of St. Petersburg and Clearwater in the north with Bradenton and Sarasota in the south, the bridge has fused the area surrounding Tampa into a whole, energizing it with new economic growth and civic pride.

# # #

Excerpted from Judith Dupré’s Bridges (Black Dog & Leventhal, 1997).
To purchase this book from Amazon, click here.

FIGG Engineering Group melds leading-edge engineering and construction technologies with sensitivity to local communities, the environment, and aesthetics in bridge designs that are cost-effective, socially and environmentally responsible, as well as works of art. The company has pioneered a bridge-design charette process that allows owners to listen to what the community wants and involve the public in the design of these landmark bridges. FIGG has built bridges in 35 states and abroad, and won 237 design awards, including three of the five Presidential Awards for aesthetic achievement awarded to bridges by the National Endowment for the Arts. For more information on FIGG Engineering Group, visit www.figgbridge.com

Pelli is concerned with architecture’s social impact—how buildings affect the people who use them and the existing fabric of the cities where they are located. He has created some of the most memorable urban public spaces of the 20th century. Embodying the fundamental idea that good buildings are good for people, his structures are landmarks in cities across the world. They include Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the tallest building in the world; World Financial Center in Battery Park City, NY; Carnegie Hall Tower in New York City; Herring Hall at Rice University in Houston; Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles; and Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. For more information, visit: www.cesar-pelli.com.

Below are excerpts from a conversation with Cesar Pelli on May 16, 2003 at his offices in New Haven.

JD: Let’s talk about the metaphoric possibilities of glass, specifically in terms of the Winter Garden and new construction downtown.

CP: Glass is a very old material but for some reason it has become the symbol of the late 20th and early 21st century architecture. I got very interested in designing with glass early in my career. I wrote a couple of articles on glass when I was with Gruen. Then glass started to have a negative image. We noticed that many clients were avoiding us, thinking they would be getting a “glass box.” This was in the late 70s and early 80s. Glass was an anathema.

JD: Fallout from the glass box phase. . .

CP: Exactly. It was a period when people were more interested in solidity, tradition, postmodernism. . .

JD: Assertion . . .

CP: Yes. Now it’s changed again. There is a great interest in glass today. What we have are two, combined phenomenon. One is that, indeed, glass is fashionable and it may not be as fashionable ten years from now. On the other hand, there are some intrinsic qualities of glass that are extraordinary and have nothing to do with fashion; qualities that are very much part of today. Unquestionably, openness and the fact that glass brings light in. Also, one of the beautiful things about glass is its ambiguity. You can see through it, but you also see reflections in the glass at the same time, you see the plane of the glass and you see through as if it wasn’t there. Those complex perceptual qualities, the complexity of seeing, are very much in tune with our lives and our interests today.

JD: Are Americans, people in general, more self-expressed and comfortable with exposure?

CP: Remember Mies van der Rohe’s all-glass building in Berlin and the Tugendghat house in Czechoslovakia—all in Europe, all glass, all before America.

JD: Before 9/11, the main approaches to the Winter Garden were from inside the World Financial Center. Now, the reconfigured façade is the front door.

CP: Yes, it has become the main entrance to the space and, as the reconstruction continues, it will become even more important. When we designed the World Financial Center (WFC), we were responding to the World Trade Center (WTC) which already existed there with all of its idiosyncrasies. Now, Libeskind, and whoever designs down there, has to respond to what we have done at the WFC. At the point where Fulton Street turns, you can see the Winter Garden at the end of the vista. The first time I saw the Winter Garden after September 11th, a few weeks later, I was walking down Broadway. I thought, my God, there’s the Winter Garden, right there!

JD: How extraordinary to have the opportunity to reconfigure a major component of your building.

CP: It is a bittersweet thing. The loss of the [North Bridge] was a great loss. People arrived through the bridge at the top of the great staircase. It was a great arrival point.

JD: The WFC was unusually gracious in the way it so modestly —in a gigantic way—existed in the shadow of the Trade towers. Now, it has a second life

CP: We had designed the WFC to fit into the composition with the WTC towers. I have always been bothered by the way the Trade Towers were so out of scale. I thought my responsibility was to bring them, as much as possible, into harmony with the rest. Which I think it did.

That was the guiding force in the design. What is wonderful, within everything else that was so terrible, is that when you see the WFC now, from the water, it looks fantastic. If the towers had never been there, the WFC would have been a perfectly handsome composition. Another issue is memory. We all know the towers were there. It’s not the same as if the towers had never been there. It’s a different equation. The physical reality would be the same, but the emotional and perceptual reality are different.

JD: Do you find yourself trying to put the towers back, in your mind’s eye?

CP: They will never go away. This will affect everything that Libeskind does. He will have to deal with the memory of the towers. If the towers had come down because they had discovered asbestos, because they were not renting, or for some other mundane reason, people would forget them. However, today, those images have been seared into people’s minds. Until everyone living on September 11, 2001, at least, passes away, the memory of the towers is going to be incredibly important to anything that happens there.

JD: The view from the new balcony at the Winter Garden accommodates a natural human urge to want to see the WTC site, while it anticipates and demands that something wonderful happen there.

CP: Now it is a part of everything that will happen down there. You will be able to follow everything that happens at Ground Zero.

JD: The balcony space is a proscenium, very theatrical.

CP: Yes, it is. I hate to use the word theatrical because it has connotations of frivolity and this is a sacred place. But, indeed, it does create the feeling that you are on a balcony watching a stage. It is a live stage, much more of a reality show than any TV program. This is true drama unfolding before your eyes. I would think that this will have to have an effect on what is designed there. I would recommend to all of those competing in the WTC memorial competition to spend some time on that perch. There are other good perches at the WFC too. In the hexagonal building, Gatehouse B, there are good views on the upper level.

JD: When you design a building—something that will outlast you, me, most of us—do you think of it as a historic, future artifact?

CP: No, I don’t think of it as a historic artifact. I think of its future in limited ways. I have never designed a true monument. I have designed primarily buildings for life, for activity. I see all of these buildings, like the people who occupy them, as being perishable and fragile, with a life that may change. I think of my buildings as living things and am less concerned with an existence beyond this limited capability. Once they cease to live, it doesn’t matter what happens.

JD: But Petronas Towers is pulling Malaysia into the future.

CP: Yes, I am very aware that the Petronas Towers have a double potential. One is to be, like all my buildings, an element of use. Once its use is finished, it ceases to have value. But because of when, where and how it was built, and the extraordinary impact it has had in Malaysia, it offers the potential for the Malaysians to keep that building well beyond its normal functioning. This is true of other buildings too.

JD: What I’m getting at is that the Petronas Towers have inspired the construction of other structures, they have brought in new business, they are molding that part of the world. Obviously, they are affecting other places too, because everyone know their image and is aware of their height. In these ways, they are futuristic.

CP: Yes. Indeed, our client never said it in so many words, but it was obvious that they wanted a building symbol, not a monument, but a symbol. Although some of the qualities of a monument are also in those buildings. An essential quality of a monument for me, from which much of its power and beauty are derived, is what the monument commemorates or celebrates. If the Vietnam Memorial were not a commemoration, if someone had simply planted two granite slabs in the ground, it would not have the power it has because of its intimate association with the Vietnam War. It allows people to make a connection with their loved ones who died there. The monument gains much of its power and beauty from the fact of the war.

JD: The shape of the Vietnam Wall was determined by the event itself. The wall rises according to the rising body count.

CP: Maya Lin’s interpretation is one of the great pieces of art or architecture of the twentieth century.

JD: What other monuments speak to you?

CP: Unquestionably, the oldest one, the pyramids in Egypt. They are about power. They are more than just a form, though so much is implicit in their form. It is an extraordinary achievement, built when technology was quite basic. It’s hard to imagine the colossal effort involved. It was done with the sweat and blood of many people. They are also the tombs of kings, gods. Their age, the fact that they are in the desert. All of this contributes to create their overwhelming, psychological power.

JD: Do you have an affinity for a particular shape? Do you find yourself drawn to triangles, circles, or squares?

CP: That’s an interesting question. No, I’m very open. As an architect, I don’t see shapes as goals in themselves. If I were a sculptor or a painter, it would be different. For me, shapes are seen in relationship to where they are. I believe that every building is a piece of a larger whole. I couldn’t say that all holes require triangles or circles. Some require a triangle, some require a circle. It depends on the circumstances, the purpose of the building, and the place where the building will be built. That’s the nature of architecture.

JD: For good architects, at least!

CP: Have you been to Delphi? It is one of those places that is unusually charged. I don’t know if it comes from the form or the natural environment. It seems to be a place where all resonances are amplified. You can feel it. You can see why the Greeks chose this place for the Oracle. More than the monument itself, it was their choice of an incredible place and marking it, that made it sacred.

JD: When I’m at a place that I’ve been told is sacred, I wonder if I would feel its sacredness if I hadn’t been told beforehand. Do you think there are energy centers on earth?

CP: Unquestionably, Delphi is one of those places where you feel it. I also feel it in the open prairie. Going through the fields of wheat in Kansas, that seem to extend forever, for me is an overwhelming experience. I don’t think this is necessarily is in the space, I think it is in us. Something resonates in us.

JD: Is it because we become conscious of our small size? I feel that same way when I am on the ocean, in the presence of a vast absence of form.

CP: Absolutely. I have never been on the ocean like that but I can imagine it is the state of Kansas multiplied a thousand times!

JD: Is it the absence of form?

CP: Nothingness is very powerful. The pyramids, alone in the desert, are powerful images. But Delphi is a concentrated space in a narrow valley.

JD: It’s an interesting question: Does power emanate from the monument, the land, or from what’s not there?

CP: We are complex beings. We respond to many different stimuli. Many things make our internal harp vibrate. When I go to the Vietnam Memorial, the memories of all that the Vietnam War meant are instantly present in me. It is a conjunction of my understanding of what Vietnam meant and of the artistic reality of the wall.

JD: Why do you think we are building so many monuments these days?

CP: I don’t know. It’s a curious phenomenon. It probably indicates a need that we collectively are trying to address. We need to mark something that is more important than daily life. At some times in America, we have not felt that need, but at other times, like now, it appears to be extremely important. Also, it has political overtones. Unquestionably, the success of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial has made people think that we can do another one as good as that.

Most other memorials in Washington are disappointing. The Roosevelt Memorial is very disappointing as is the Korean War Memorial. Those things, the soldiers, the women, they’ve added to the Vietnam Memorial are horrendous. The other great monuments, of course, are the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Now, if that was Ulysses Grant sitting there, that memorial would lose much of its power and beauty.

JD: Lincoln was the closest thing we had to an American god. His memorial is a simple, classical structure. We see the seated Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. And that’s it. Is that its power—that it is elemental and not full of furniture like the FDR Memorial?

CP: Well, no, because the Jefferson Memorial is also very simple and it has no power. And I also have great admiration for Jefferson. The Washington Memorial is very powerful, and it doesn’t tell you anything. It’s an obelisk, a form borrowed from the Egyptians.

I have always been interested in why very tall buildings are so powerful. I’ll go straight to the punch line: I believe it is in our physical nature. The human being is a very unusual creature that walks vertically. Our eyes are near the very top of the stick. The power of a sculpture by Giacometti is because he reduces people to that essence of the vertical line. Obelisks are an attempt not to recreate the human form but to recreate the verticality that is the nature of the human form. They are extremely vertical. Humans are tenuously vertical—indeed, if you fall asleep or dead, you’re down.

JD: How does this idea, that we’re vertical beings, relate to the power of a tall building?

CP: The obelisk is an extremely vertical thing, beyond normal. The pyramids recreate a gravity form. When you play in the sand and create a conical pyramid, it reaches its angle of repose. Pyramids are close to the angle of repose so that they look like elements of the earth. But an obelisk goes well beyond the angle of repose. It is standing there, like we are, almost defying the law of gravity. You can sense this in the Washington Monument very clearly.

JD: What is the difference between gazing up at a tower and climbing it?

CP: They are both part of our aspiration to move up. I have checked into the thesaurus and the synonyms relating to up or high are all incredibly positive. Elevated, noble. All of the words relating to low height are negative. The fact that relative height has affected our language means that this feeling is deep in us. Look up! That means you are looking at things with a higher value. It permeates our consciousness. Looking up you are admiring something that is higher than you. Climbing up, you reach a point where people look up to you. They both come from the same, natural human impetus but one is outside of us, and the other a part of us.

JD: How does memory affect the way you design?

CP: Memory considerations are an integral part of my designs. When we start to design a building, we make a photographic record of buildings in that city. Most of them are nearby, but we include all notable buildings that aren’t nearby. One of us in the team will go to the library and research important buildings that used to exist, that have been torn down. In some cities, it is amazing the number of great buildings that don’t exist anymore. In many cases, they still exist in the memory of their people. If you are designing a building that will become truly part of a city, then you need to deal with the whole environment, not only the physical environment that is seen everyday but also with what is remembered.

To give an obvious example, you could not design anything near the World Trade Center site and ignore what used to be there. That would be foolish. That is an extreme case. The WTC towers left such strong memories in all of us.

But this happens at all levels: you remember trees, for example. When I first came to the University of Illinois, the walkways were lined with giant elm trees. Shortly after I left, they were cut down because of Dutch Elm disease. This is almost fifty years ago, but I cannot go back to that campus and see it without the elm trees. For me, they’re still there. I can’t help compare what’s there with what it used to be, with the way the buildings now relate to each other, and how they used to. What’s interesting is that young students who never saw those elms are aware of them too. Although they have never seen the elms, they are part of the collective memory which goes beyond the memory of any one individual.

When we see the pyramids of Egypt, we participate in the collective memory that somehow ties us back to what was happening in the world many centuries ago. It is the collective memory, memory that lives again when we read history. History is a restitching of memory. Collective memory is not just what people keep in their heads, it’s what’s in books, sculptures, paintings —that’s all part of the collective memory. It is those things that have been written down to help us remember. Works such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, were composed and became poems that could be remembered by people before books existed so that these extraordinary events could be remembered much longer than the memory of the people who participated in them.

They are, in every case, memory records of the interactions between gods and humans, which are critical in any society. The Bible, the Iliad, the Odyssey were books that shaped behavior and morals in their respective societies. Monuments also make people remember. Cheops wanted to be remembered, and his investment worked, while the monument of Halicarnassus disappeared. Some monuments remain, others don’t.

JD: What is it about stone that inspires such a sense of memory?

CP: Stone has been for centuries the strongest, most durable building material human beings have had. They have given form for centuries to the most prized, monumental and important structures. We make immediate associations of stone used in this manner with all that has been previously expressed in stone.

In Japan, it’s another story. They built with stone but it doesn’t have the value it has in Mediterranean countries where our culture was born. In the northern forests—Scandinavia, Russia, Japan—most of the structures were wood. The Japanese developed a different attitude. The Temple of Ise is taken down every twenty years and rebuilt next door. So it’s not the physical object that remains, it is the design that remains. This is extraordinary and in some ways much more poetic. It is about life.

JD: Did they use wood because it constantly replenishes itself, as nature replenishes the world?

CP: Yes, and also because, after a while, wood rots. Both stone and wood are about our extension of ourselves in time, and how we maintain forms and ideas. In the case of the pyramids, an incredible first effort is required, you make it as strong as you can so that afterwards it can fend for itself against weather, thieves, vandals.

In the Japanese tradition, wood depends on continuous care and maintenance. It accepts that in the moment that people stop caring, the moment you stop believing, that monument will disappear. Today, even if one stopped believing in the gods, Ise would probably be maintained because it is a national treasure. But it requires continuous care. In many ways, contemporary steel and glass buildings are like wood: if you leave them alone, the glass will break, the steel will rust. It will take longer, but they will also become a pile of rubble unless they are continuously kept up. When a window breaks or steel rusts, you must replace it.

Stone can also be used in ways that require continuous care. In most of the Gothic cathedrals, stone was not used to be massive and permanent, it was cut to be as thin and slender as possible. Because stone also decays, though at a slower rate, in most cathedrals there are people who are permanently taking care of the stones. They replace them, one by one. If you think of stone in terms of Roman construction—the Pantheon or the Coliseum—those will take care of themselves for centuries, but if you think of stone in terms of Chartres, it won’t. Windows will break, water will come in, and the stone will suffer and corrode. As soon as a piece of stone in a flying buttress breaks away, the whole building, or a chunk of it, may come down.

JD: George [Knight] and I were talking about full-body immersion fonts, for baptism, about the idea of descending into death and rising into life. . .

CP: . . . which was supposed to be charged with some sense of fright. You are dying when you go down and are reborn as you emerge from the water. Very beautiful, a symbolic sacrifice.

JD: Yes, you physically descend, but the rising, the true rising, is in your heart and your head. It’s not tangible. I wish there was some way to capture in this book that sense of going down and coming up. I don’t know if it can be done visually.

CP: There is some of that in Maya Lin’s [Vietnam Veterans Memorial], unquestionably. You start at one end, descend and come up. Although that idea is not explicit—I don’t know if she did it unconsciously or not—but the wall connects with ancient rituals. The idea of going down and coming up, of death and rebirth, occurs in many different cultures. In some ways, memorials about tragedies require recreating a sense of death and rebirth.

To quote you, dear Mario, “architecture lasts more than the life of man. This is the measure of a man’s life and his mark.” You have made your mark on the land and in our hearts. Tanti auguri, and many more years of good health, good friends, and good work. * * *

The first act in making architecture is not to put a stone on top of a stone, but to put a stone on the earth. It’s a way of possessing the earth. It’s a fundamental act, a sacred act.

It impresses me to see an ancient fossil. I bought a spiral-shaped fossil that is millions of years old, which I keep as a sculpture. In a million years the pyramids will probably not be here anymore. That which is man-made is ephemeral. This is our condition, to have brief moments.

The critical reading of the territory is the very first act of architecture. Architecture always transforms its site; it never leaves it neutral. It transforms the existing equilibrium into another equilibrium. This is true not only of my work, but of all architecture, whether profound or banal. If there were a thermometer capable of measuring the quality of architecture, it would be able to measure the transformation that has occurred in the landscape.

Beauty is not a secondary thing; it is a primary thing. When I see the texture of the walls at Mogno, I know it is not secondary, it is not decoration. It is structural. I love this essential aspect of architecture because it is not superfluous, it is necessary. It is like the beauty of a woman without makeup. Beauty is integral to architecture.

I maintain that for every creative person, not only architects, but all artists, their research is the great past. Picasso is the primitive man, Paul Klee is the child in every one of us, Henry Moore is modern but archaic. Paradoxically, with every creation, it is not the future the artist is thinking of, but the past.

I like the dimension of man. I want to see how man moves in the landscape. I try to understand two things: first, how the sun moves in a twenty-four-hour period and second, how the seasons change. There are things I see in the winter that I don’t see in the summer.

Architecture has the power to survive. Its potential for memory exists in its ability to endure. History and memory are fundamental to architecture, not its function.

I use drawing not as a representation, but as an instrument of research. The drawing helps me understand the problem. This is why I don’t work on a computer. The computer is mute. When I make a sketch, it has hope. The sketch is not a representation, but an instrument to understand the problem. Therefore, I often think with the pencil.

People sense value. We need to listen to the people, listen to what they believe in. People know that they are born and that they must die. This mystery of life needs expression.

Rocks pray.

A work well done has its own spirituality. I have never worried about symbolic values. I don’t trust them.

To live is to be capable of orienting oneself. All the great architecture of the past has provided this orientation. I go into a castle and pretty much am capable of knowing where I am. I go into Chartres, and even if the space is not entirely apparent, I have the capability of grasping the whole. This is what makes architecture livable. I would like this communal house that we call the city to have these points of reference to permit people to orient themselves. Without light, there is no space. If we closed these windows, this room would disappear.

There’s a monumental aspect to architecture that I think is a crucial part of architecture. The monumental scale confronts the city and the landscape. It’s a form a resistance to the banalities of the new.

I love architecture. I also love all the things about architecture that I cannot express about it. Architecture is space organized within and by the forces that bring it to the ground. When I make a building, I like to feel that it is bound to the ground. An airplane flies; it has another beauty. But for me, architecture has its roots in the earth. The idea of ornamentation is secondary to this. I like to think that people can feel the nature of my spaces, that they are not distracted by decoration.

At Tamaro, hands became a leitmotif for the metaphoric illustrations of the Madonna: Mary as a boat, as a flowering almond during the confines of winter, as an olive, as a cloud, as the moon, as the sea, as a circle, as the city on the hill, as the sun, as a rose, as a pomegranate rich with gracious seeds, as a column, as a restorative herb for our dry hearts, as a tall pine tree, as the queen’s road, as a fortress, as a lighthouse, as a shadow, as an illustrated book that discovers the wonders of the word. I think the new has to be full of memory.

I would like it if the house of today could once again embody the idea of protection, of a maternal womb that defends and protects, but exists also to enable communication, because man only lives in context with others. The idea of a house brings with it the idea of patriotism because the house is never individual, it always connotes the collective. A church is a rich addition to a city, even for those who don’t go to church.

A church is the place, par excellence, of architecture. It is the communal house, the house of the faithful. When you enter a church, you already are part of what has transpired and will transpire there. The church is a house that puts a believer in a dimension where he or she is the protagonist. The sacred directly lives in the collective. Man becomes a participant in a church, even if he never says anything. A church is impossible without memory, a church is the location of memory.

Architecture, church architecture, describes visually the idea of the sacred, which is a fundamental need of man. There is great mystery in a church. For me it is a great privilege to be confronted with the design of a church, because it shelters the most powerful themes of humanity: birth, marriage, death.

I like proposals but I like the realization of a project a hundred times more. When you are actually making the building, it is the most beautiful time.

Tall masts of Mannahatta! Superb-faced Manhattan! Beautiful hills of Brooklyn! Vast, unspeakable show and lesson! My city! Has anyone since Walt Whitman done justice to the ecstatic inventory of New York? This book comes close, with a thousand portraits, some familiar, some less so. It is a yearbook of sorts, picking out individuals in a cast of thousands, putting names to faces that are sometimes overlooked in the presence of New York’s powerful, indivisible gestalt.

On New York streets, time, history, and memory converge and disperse with breathtaking speed. It is a living space, framed by street after street of widely disparate structures, every corner, every inch impossibly cobbled together by generations alike only in their ambition. It is gritty with dirt and failed dreams, a gray city made alabaster by virtue of the hopes of the sheer numbers who call it home.

There is no ambivalence in New York. It’s too tough a place. Sure, there are days of ambivalence, years even, but the thought of living anywhere else is unfathomable to those under its spell. Native birth has nothing to do with being a New Yorker. Nor years—one can become a New Yorker in an instant. Even those who have physically left never leave completely. Welded into a wrought-iron fence at the World Financial Center, overlooking the Hudson River, are Frank O’Hara’s words: “One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes. I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store, or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”

Another poet. Describing the world pulse that beats here always comes down to distillation. One can attempt to categorize New York, realizing all the while that its essence, like the elephant described by the six blind men, defies pat definition. Aficionados of skyscrapers, churches, bridges, restaurants, or residences in any of the five boroughs could speak volumes on all those subjects, and have. In its infinite variety and fluidity, the city cannot be pinned down. One view can merely be added to the thousands that have been offered and yet will come.

Kurt Vonnegut coined the phrase “Skyscraper National Park” to describe Manhattan. The idea of the city as a national park, a rare configuration that deserves protection, approaches truth. Some call the deep spaces that are formed by New York’s tall buildings “canyons” but, with a connotation more geologic than urban, the word seems inadequate to describe the city’s chiseled verticality. Skyscrapers, the most spectacular display of our civilization’s technical prowess, are made by human hands. We are dwarfed by their shadows and yet they are our creations. This uneasy possession, we by them or them by us, sets up a reflexive tension that adds to the city’s nerve.

Manhattan’s brash ascendancy is made possible by the island’s solid schist foundation and exaggerated by the two rivers that contain its twenty-two square miles. Because of her skyscrapers, Manhattan invariably claims the lion’s share of visibility, though it is but a fraction of the 320 square miles that make up New York City.

Everyone in New York weighs 150 pounds. As any elevator mechanic can tell you, that’s the weight those “maximum occupancy” notices in elevators are based on. Ask him about skyscrapers and he’ll speak the language of his profession—”low-rise, high-rise and freight”—about twenty such elevators in a building a block wide. It was all uphill once Elijah Otis figured out in 1854 that people get grumpy if they have to climb more than six flights of stairs. Though every other aspect of a skyscraper can change, its core—the elevators—rarely do. If you pause too long between car and lobby, the door will begin to close, a process known in the business as “nudging,” no doubt with New Yorkers in mind. Don’t try to stop them. The doors will win every time.

What is a skyscraper? Existing beyond the debate of steel skeletons versus the inclusion of elevators is the one true definition: intent of scale. Only in New York would a fifty-story building appear a modest proposal. Louis Sullivan built only one building here, the Bayard Building on Bleecker Street, yet surely he had New York’s swagger in mind when he defined a skyscraper: “The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.”

The Empire State, Chrysler, Daily News, American Radiator buildings and Rockefeller Center epitomize the golden age of the skyscraper between the two World Wars. Mies van der Rohe’s bronze Seagram Building heralded the arrival of the International Style, presaged six years earlier and just across Park Avenue, by the remarkable glass-clad Lever House. Only a New York character like Philip Johnson could recycle the past with postmodern buildings that have been notoriously compared to Chippendale furniture (the Sony Building) or a tube of lipstick (53rd at Third). The current hybrids bred from modernist, postmodern, and vernacular styles pale beside a true original, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum.

It was in October 2001, in Washington, DC, that I began to grasp the enormity of New York’s loss after the fall. When that city was laid out it was conceived as a star, with each of the main avenues punctuated by a view of the domed Capitol, a constant reminder of democratic ideals. When the World Trade Center went up, the twin towers shunned the mere scale of the streets, preferring instead to be creatures of the sky. They had no relationship to human measure, their size was beyond even New York’s large grasp. They were always there, a navigational constant that was taken for granted. We are exhausted by the effort of understanding the new emptiness left in their wake. Like New York itself, they have entered the realm of myth, as real now in memory as they once were in steel and concrete. Perhaps more so. My ferocious love of the skyline has never been stronger.

I cannot decide if New York is a city of sidewalks or of sky. The sidewalks are addictive in their turbulence, theatricality, and liberating anonymity. The latter quality, the city’s most delectable by far, left few convinced that a certain gentleman was innocent of his crimes by virtue of insanity, proof of which , his lawyers argued, was his propensity for walking around the Village in a bathrobe. I’ve ignored worse.

If you want to know New York, walk. Many of the gems portrayed in this book are tucked away in neighborhoods known best on foot. The shops comprise a world bazaar, especially in Brooklyn and Queens, the latter a veritable United Nations, just without the seats. The sidewalks are wide enough to hold despair and elation. The energy rising off them, whether yours or another’s, can change the face of a day. It’s theater at its finest, and free. Gawk upwards if you must, but gimmeabreak, don’t block the flow. New York’s greatest mystery is the collective knowledge of its inhabitants, which travels from one to another through some strange osmosis that may or may not be related to the 96-point type used in the headlines of the New York Post. The street cannot be switched on or off. Its spiritual force is a religion.

The Woolworth Building, in lower Manhattan, is called the “cathedral of commerce.” The uptown Asphalt Green, a parabolic-arched sanctuary for pothole repair, was condemned by Robert Moses as the “cathedral of asphalt.” Between and beyond them are cathedrals that are, well, cathedrals. New York City is home to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, spiritual anchor of Midtown; Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the world’s largest cathedral; and Temple Emanu-El, the world’s largest synagogue. From Abyssinian to Zion, the five boroughs boast hundreds of churches, temples, mosques, and synagogues. In Brooklyn, known as the Borough of Churches, spires are still visible on the skyline. It recalls the century, from 1790 to 1890, when Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street was the city’s tallest building. Like New York’s museums, theaters, and libraries, each of these houses of worship offers a presence and a possibility that enrich the city and our conception of it—whether ones enters them or not.

Bridges, those momentous doorways, connect New York City to itself and so to the world. A daily flood pours over them. The Gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, the filigreed grace of the Queensboro Bridge, the immense span of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and the muscular heroics of the George Washington Bridge, known familiarly as George, are monuments. Each of them, along with their depots and innumerable smaller bridges, is breathtaking in history, conception, and utility.

On the day I moved to Manhattan, twenty years old and hungry, I missed the exit that takes you across the Triborough Bridge, into the city and away from everything that is small, safe, and predictable. I still question that ridiculously diminutive exit sign, which leads to the greatest city on earth. On that day, I landed somewhere in Brooklyn. A helpful soul gave me directions three times, and three times I squinted back at this exotic creature. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. Years later, I learned that this particular accent, of the “toidy-toid and toid” variety that has been mercilessly parodied in the media, is nearly extinct. Now I know it is a treasure, one of the many that come together to form this improbable, intriguing, demanding, generous place. On that first day though, I would have handed over my passport if asked. Truly, New York was another world.