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I like to design public space, so I am always looking for what I call “trigger” things - what people tend to be drawn to. I’m most passionate about observing what people do, how they walk, what they’re thinking about, maybe. My fondness for it is really not looking at buildings it’s for the human condition or human activity. I’m on the 21st floor and look out onto the harbor and the river, the boats and the people. It’s all stuff that’s related to what I’m doing. But I always have a pile of stuff because I can’t walk anymore and need to have everything in arm’s reach: my cell phone, drawings and sketches of projects I’m working on, research pictures. It reminds me of my days in Italy, where I lived and worked for ten years before coming to New York. What do you always have next to your computer?Ī cup of coffee.
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I said jokingly to her one day, “Why do we always keep doing the same thing? Why do we keep coming here?” She said, “Well, I guess because we look around here and really know it’s worth it.” If you have a career in the arts, this is the place that proves it’s all worth it. We meet there, and we always see the Picassos and Matisses and Cezannes. I very often go on Sundays with Alice Aycock, the environmental artist, who’s been a friend since the 1960s. What New York City museum do you always go back to? Both of them helped me liberate my mind from formalist design and art. One that’s precious to me is a Rauchenberg poster of a portrait he made of Kiesler. I own a lot of prints: multiples of my own graphic work and posters by artists I admire. Is there one thing you own multiple versions of? Like Picasso said, “I draw like other people bite their nails.” The last thing I sketched was for a greenhouse project in California I’m working on. What’s the last thing you made with your hands? His response was “Why would I want to do that?,” which embarrassingly reminded me to never assume what an artist might want to do. But we shared an amusing dialogue: I had this idea for him to create an outdoor artwork on the very visible fire escape going down the back of his building. He hired us mainly because Leo Castelli, his art dealer, thought we were a really hot number at that time. The design wasn’t that innovative because he wasn’t that into architecture. I had relatively few interactions with him when SITE designed an interior renovation for his studio at 381 Lafayette St. Robert Rauschenberg, whom I admired tremendously for his inventiveness - I would say he’s the artist I admire most. Which New Yorker would you want to hang out with? I have an early Claes Oldenburg drawing, but that’s about it. I would love to be one, if I could afford it. What work of art or artifact are you most surprised you own? It was a period when everyone in SoHo, where I had the studio, was an environmental artist who wanted to escape from the confinement of the art gallery.Ī very dark, rich green. At first, we were doing performances and publishing, by hand really, things about the environment and ecology. I had enough in my bank account from the public-art commissions to self-fund the studio for a year. Why do you want to do that old-fashioned abstract-art stuff?!” So one thing led to another and I started SITE. Then Frederick Kiesler, a famous architect from Austria, told me, “James, you have an architectural spirit. Pretty much as soon as I got out of school, I had gallery representation, then I became part of Marlborough Gallery. I called it “plop art,” for art in a plaza, and that was the beginning. I actually had a very successful early career as a sculptor. What’s the first job you had in New York? My drawings are very delicate, so they’re hung in darker parts of the apartment. I probably have a couple hundred posters from different places I’ve lectured. Some are about SITE’s early work and promotions for lectures. Posters, mainly, because the room gets flooded with light.