I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.
You couldn’t put me in a social group setting. I’m probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
Math, it’s a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.
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.
You should be having more fun in high school, exploring things because you want to explore them and learning because you love learning-not worrying about competition.
Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can’t be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.
The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it’s magical.
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.
I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.
Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that’s true in any creative field.
It terrified me to have an idea that was solely mine to be no longer a part of my mind, but totally public.
You really can’t function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I’m an architect. I’m an artist. I make things.
It’s only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.
I begin by imagining an artwork verbally. I try to describe in writing what the project is, what it is trying to do. I need to understand the artwork without giving it a specific materiality or solid form.
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.
Growing up, I thought I was white. It didn’t occur to me I was Asian-American until I was studying abroad in Denmark and there was a little bit of prejudice.
I’m not in a hurry to do a lot of projects. I am very resolved in each project I take on.
I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.
My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
I was probably the first kid in my high school to go to Yale. I applied almost as a lark. Then, when I got there, I was the dumbest person in your class.