About
How do you get stuck on something? I can only vaguely remember how I got stuck on Architecture.
One influence was Lambert Airport in St. Louis. Lambert was an iconic airport partly because it was TWA’s hub at the time and partly because Lambert had a distinctive Air Traffic Control Tower design. Somehow or somewhere I read an article called The Architecture of Lambert Airport. After reading that article, I was obsessed to know more about Lambert’s architecture and architecture in general.
After looking in the Yellow Pages for the architectural firms named in the article and talking to a few of them, I came up with a brilliant idea. Call a professor at Washington University School of Architecture and ask if I can audit his class. Now, I’m in high school at the time. Brilliant, right? Even though I knew nothing about the content of his course, I just had to go. The professor agreed. So, I get to the class and take a seat in the last row, high up in a large, stadium style classroom staring down to a large chalkboard full of math equations. This is my first exposure to the term “Differential Equations”. I had no idea what they were talking about. But I sat through the whole class. Yes, sir.
Shortly after that experience, I lived in an architect’s home. Yep. On the other side of the world to boot. I was selected for a Youth Award sponsored by the YMCA. As part of the award, a group of awardees were selected to do YMCA charity work in Bogota, Columbia, South America for a summer. My Bogota host just happened to be a working architect. It was like God talking just to me. The family did not speak English and I did not speak Spanish. But every evening we sat around a dinner table trying to communicate and laughing at every attempt. It was like playing Pictionary. I don’t remember the family name. I just remember their home being full of sunlight, an outdoor court yard with yellow walls that reflected sunlight into the interior spaces and a wrap-around balcony. My senses were awakened. Architectural awareness has been in my bones ever since.
But if you ask me how I got into photography, well that is very specific. It was the famous photograph by Jean Guichard—The Crashing Waves Around the Lighthouse in Brittany, France. This picture literally stopped me in my tracks. I was mesmerized by it for months. Bought a ginormous print to hang on my wall. It inspired me to purchase my first camera. I had never taken a picture in my life up to that point. I just decided I want to make amazing pictures too.
