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.
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The sentimental favorites were still scented with the perfumed paper that once lined his bureau drawers. There was a soft hat embroidered with a heart, his first gift, which was impossibly small and strangely alien to this first-time mother. Oh, it occurred to me, this thinglet inside will need clothes. There was another hat, a jaunty cobalt blue and yellow number, that Emmet wore on a walk one day in autumn, the glorious season of his birth. A fire-red leaf dropped into his carriage, alit on the blue hat, and created an effortless, sublime work of art. I’ve kept it for the memory of that moment. And then there is a little green sweater, the most precious item of all.

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On summer nights, my older, next-door neighbor Rickey Caruolo would play the guitar on his front steps. He always drew a crowd—women who were mesmerized by his movie-star good looks, his football buddies from Mount Pleasant High, old timers, and children, lots of them. Fifty-two children lived on Lennon Street, and the undisputed god of that street was Rickey. Lennon was a street of families, each contributing four, five, six boomers to the tumble, the backbone of the American dream, fifties style.

Everyone had two parents and a dog. There were endless days of four-square, red rover, and hide-and-go-seek. It was a moveable feast: if someone wasn’t home, you simply found someone to play with at the next house.

We swam in the summer, burned leaves in the fall, starred in Mr. Nickerson’s Halloween movies, sang carols in the long winter night before the annual Christmas party at the Dionne’s house—all of us, every season, every year. Even the dogs played together.

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His paintings are displayed in churches throughout the United States, many of them on Native American reservations. In 2003, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. Father John lives at the Benedictine Grange, a monastic community in rural Connecticut, which he founded in 1977. I spoke with Father John at the Grange in July 2004.

This interview was published in its entirety in the September 2004 issue of Faith & Form, the journal of the Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art and Architecture, a Professional Interest Area of the American Institute of Architects. Judith Dupré serves as one of the journal’s editorial advisors.

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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. . .

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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.

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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.

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In the wake of events that were, by every human measure, incomprehensible, there is no other place to bring our misery but before God. As days of prayer and remembrance stretch into weeks, many of us will pick our way through real and emotional rubble and go to church.

Believers and nonbelievers alike need these quiet caves of refuge—whether church, synagogue or mosque—to cope with our newly lost sense of ourselves as a nation blessed by God. Gathering together is comforting because it is in community that we best understand that life’s joys and sorrows are shared by all, perhaps not equally, but certainly by all.

Churches are like no other structures. Unlike supermarkets, banks, and skyscrapers, which we move in and through at a fantastic pace, churches provide the rare opportunity to pause and reflect. Their sole function is to provide human beings with a space in which to contemplate, individually and in communion with others, their immortal dimension.

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