My career has flowed in courses, seemingly separate but actually well integrated, over the last thirty years. In the spirit of simplicity I shall identify these channels as professional, intellectual and technical.
I choose “technical” as a description of making art because the word's root is techne, often translated as “craft.” The implication I intend is that one learns from making things—physically manipulating material—what cannot be learned any other way. In design I endeavor to remain close to the process of fabrication, altering the design to fit production rather than torturing production to fit outrageous designs. Even more importantly my exhibitions, at P.S.1 in Long Island City; at the Linda Hall Library of Science and Technology; at the Greenlease Gallery, Rockhurst University; and, most recently, at the Kansas City Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art, all involved making tangible objects.
Craft however, runs the risk of degenerating into mere handiwork if it is not intelligently guided. Towards that end I maintain an active life of the mind, constantly reading and writing. The fruits of this labor are two edited books and several articles in print over the last five years. In print is “Teaching geometry to artists” (2005). In press is “Writing about Thinking in Pictures: Geometry and Rhetoric” and a Special Section devoted to the architect Eero Saarinen on the centennial of his birth, all appearing in The Nexus Network Journal of Architecture and Mathematics. My most recent book is The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson Atkins Museum (2007) and contains the essay “In fluence of matter and flux of mind” which is a close critical reading of interior space in the internationally acclaimed Bloch Building in Kansas City, Missouri.
My professional track in architecture specializes in remodeling old homes. I chose residential architecture because it is design intensive and because the construction process is very hands on. I have all the skills you would expect in a professional who works on daily basis with all kinds of people including; attention to detail, experience reading and producing construction documents, ability to evaluate the progress of a job and the knowledge to intervene in order to keep a project on budget and on schedule. Chief among these skills, however, are my experiences in a fundamentally collaborative art form. I enjoy collaboration and believe that art works are always more effective when they respond to multiple conditions with layers of signification. I bring all these skills to bear in the process of making art installations for commercial spaces.