If you recall, Arthur Drexler did a big show of the past of great buildings, 19th century. He did a show at the Modern and it was stunning, and everybody at that time was sort of looking for an alternative to modernism, which was cold and inhuman, and they wondered how do we get out of this. And there Arthur presented them with the way out is to go back, and that was called postmodernism, and Philip did the AT&T — Philip Johnson. And then everybody jumped on it. And I remember being in a lecture somewhere or in a conference somewhere, and they were all talking about how wonderful the new architecture was and I objected. I said that the postmodern work came from Greek temples. Greek temples were anthropomorphic. And I said, “If you have to go back, you can go 300 million years before man to fish.”
And I just said that. Because I was looking for a way to express movement with architecture, because I couldn’t do decoration that was postmodern. I was looking for something to replace the feeling in a building. And I think so much of that came from looking at the Greek statues. If you look at the Elgin Marbles, those warriors are pressing the shields into the stone, and you feel the pressure, and you feel the horses are moving, and if they could do that with inert materials, I thought, “Why not see if that could become an architectural direction that would enliven the buildings, humanize them, and create humanity?”
Because very primitive is “the fold,” which there have been books written about it, Leibniz and people like that. Michelangelo spent years drawing the fold. And so you know the reason is when you’re a baby, you’re in your mother’s arms and you’re in the fold. And there’s something primitive, beautiful, and humanity about it. And I thought the Greeks knew how to express it. Can we do that in architecture?