HOW DID YOU FIRST BECOME INTERESTED IN ARCHITECTURE?

In high school, pretty standard. I liked art, and I was good at math. I didn't especially like math, but I did well in that, and it came pretty easily. And I loved to draw, and I wasn't especially good at it, but I liked it. So that at one point, one of my friends, who was similar, actually hit on the idea of architecture. And I thought, "Yeah, that's cool," it sort of blends the two. I don't have any relatives, I really had no mentors, but I was at least thinking [about] that, and when I applied to schools, two of the schools I applied to I specifically applied to architecture programs. In the end I wound up, I went to Princeton.

Architecture was simply one of the things you could major in. The first semester I took the Intro 101 course with Dean Geddes, and he talked about being able to read a building and really explaining a way for those of us who didn't really have any kind of art, real art background, to take people who were sort of more literate and explain a way of looking at the built environment and reading buildings, being able to understand from the outside of a building what kinds of spaces were going to be inside it. Reading it, reading buildings in all sorts of different ways, and I was hooked! I just found that pretty fascinating...I focussed a lot and haven't deviated from it much yet.