Lee Mindel's Contribution to Architecture

I’m not dead yet, I don’t know. You just keep trying. I mean we try to look at all the elements
available to us as environmentalists, artists, architects, builders, craftsmen and distill each of
those down and create a kind of palette in which of those disciplines becomes part of your brush
stroke and you create a painting by not ignoring any one of those things or taking one for granted
and synthesizing them. So I guess we try to use the landscape, use the building and use the
interior seamlessly and maybe we’re exploring that.

Also we’ve straddle the kind of ism of their kind of two camps that have always existed. There’s
a kind of abstract camp and the realist camp throughout history. When modernism got very
popular and the kind of idea that we could live in Utopia as modernism in the machine would
replace men. It was a fantasy and an experiment that really didn’t work. So then we saw after
that whole kind of modernist thing and you see a low cost housing which ganged to the idea of
Utopia which it really wasn’t. In fact, there’s a place called the Utopia parkway which is kind of
hilarious. So all these towers and all these Corbusier, Mercier blocks were built with the hope
that of being Utopia but without the master doing it himself it’s hard to assimilate Utopia and it
was also a kind of fantasy.

So after that movement we moved into a kind of historicism and a post modernism in which
everybody was grabbing on to something from the past because they felt as though their future
had failed them. So then we’ve got passed that and then modernism became an ism. It became a
revivalism. So now we’re kind of in that modernist, revivalism and then there’s this whole group
of the orthogonal and the rationalist, and then there’s the flying shrapnel and the irrational. And
you have those two things going on. But Peter and I have tried to do is find a way to link those
things together to a string in our worth not turn our back on the past but not give up on the future
either. And how we could work in context in a non-literal way, in a somewhat abstract way to
bring the past and the present in a kind of synthesis that I think that’s navigating that line is very
interesting.