Mentions personal use of Moby Dick.

Transcript context

…If you go to this place of creative solitude, what’s your creative process? Is there something you’ve noticed about what you do that leads to good work? I love to be able not only to lose focus, but kind of to focus on the peripheral view and to allow different things to occur at once. So I will often, in my loneliness journeys, I will often listen to Leonard Bernstein. Anything I can find online by Lenny Bernstein, it’s reading a nature paper, it’s War and Peace. It’s really revisiting all the texts that are so timeless for me with opportunities that are very, very timely. And I think for me, the creative process is really about bringing timeless problems or concepts together with timely technologies to observe them. I remember when we did the Mandela Pavilion, we read Moby Dick, the whiteness of the whale, the albino, the different the other, and that got us to work on melanin and melanine also is sort of an output from the death mass. So it’s lots of things happening at the same time and really allowing them to come together to form this view about the world through the lens of a spirit being or a living being or a material. And then focus on the world through the lens of that material. The glasswork was another project like that where we were fascinated by glass because obviously it’s superb material for architecture, but we created this new glass printing technology for the first time that was shedding light on the biomechanics of fluid glass, the math and the physics of which was never done before, which was so exciting to us, but revealing new knowledge about the world through technology. That’s one theme. The reincarnation between things, material and immaterial. That’s another theme. Lenny Bernstein, War and Peace, Tolstoy. You’ve tweeted a Tolstoy quote from War and Peace, as of course you would. Everything I know, I know because of love.…

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