Gargoyles
As a student in Paris, I stood in the streets, hours at a time, drawing the faces above windows and doorways. They were the silent, but often animated witnesses to centuries of urban life. The Gothic cathedrals offered a parade of figures, large and small, in all manner of poses and expression, telling a story beyond words.
The figures’ enduring place in these ancient narratives were inseparable from their place in the architecture; their aspirations could be felt even without knowing the stories themselves. They were part of the human drama going back to our collective beginning. Touched by this feeling of our humanity found in sculpture of the human form, I began to make these forms myself, integrating them into the architecture I was making. Although this tradition has existed for thousands of years, it has been dormant since the middle of the 20th Century. The effort represented in the subsequent work has been a return to this rich current of architectural expression to find a meaningful place in learning environments and in contemporary architecture.