In an interview with Archinect Magazine, Michael talks about venturing beyond an 'intellectual practice,' how he began to work with Native American and Buddhist communities, and blending it into his work as an architect.
With architecture, it has to do with absorbing what other people are saying or not saying. Then you can intuit and bring that into the work and then putting it back out again in ways they couldn’t have imagined. Sometimes you can’t speak about it because they think they just hired a guru instead of an architect, but I think it’s a capacity of patience and open-mindedness and then wanting other people to see what I see, not trying to always impress with how much I know and how good I am. It has to do with my relationship with other people. Then the same fairness that I try to understand and enact between people I begin to see between materials on a building, and the way details come together, and so it has shifted me radically from the time when you pretend you’re mean and angry and you’re making buildings that can cut you like a knife. You know, you make things that are going to shock you and scare you. It wasn’t about that. It shifted my view from the motivation being fear to the motivation being love. Not romantic love, but going from anger to joy, basically.
The full interview can be found here.
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