I really enjoyed hanging out with some of the teachers. This one chemistry teacher, she liked hanging out. I liked making explosives. We would stay after school and blow things up.
I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.
I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts.
It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.
Some artists want to confront. Some want to invoke thought. They're all necessary and they're all valid.
The only thing that mattered was what you were to do in life, and it wasn't about money. It was about teaching, or learning.
When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business.
Every memorial in its time has a different goal.
Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.
I loved school. I studied like crazy. I was a Class A nerd.
Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
It was a requirement by the veterans to list the 57,000 names. We're reaching a time that we'll acknowledge the individual in a war on a national level.
In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it's done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures.
You have to have conviction and completely question everything and anything you do. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you know, the side of your brain that has the smarts won't necessarily help you in making art.
A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don't see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time.
Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.
