This is a great moment for me to understand that environment and body do have an effect on the brain, but I'm saying that the mind, that's something very individual, and that's something that holds the connection to the soul, to the individual spirit, and you can't scientifically pin that down. Hello everybody, I'm Amelia, and you're listening to One to One. This week's guest is Stephen Hole, known for monumental works built all around the world, specifically invoke light, color, and porosity in programmatic and aesthetic ways. Hole can also be thought of as an artist's architect.
His firm has done work for many arts institutions, he methodically sketches his projects and watercolors, and his style is heavily influenced by art practice and theory. He's also very interested in the phenomenology of architecture, how it's sensed by humans, and its impact on our existence. I wanted to know how Hole uses different media, whether it's watercolors, dance, or film, in his practice and understanding of architecture. We spoke in a totally unremarkable conference room at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.
The day before Hole was to give his keynote to the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture's Conference. Well, we're here at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, where the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture is holding its conference every two years, and you'll be giving one of the keynote presentations to our morning. The Salk Institute, of course, is a marvel of symmetry and light, signed by Louis Kahn in collaboration with Dr. Jonas Salk, who discovered the polio vaccine.
And I would like to hear your about your relationship with Kahn in a moment, but as the folklore goes, the Salk Institute was founded on the idea that when Jonas Salk was looking for the polio vaccine, he was doing this research at the University of Pittsburgh, and he couldn't get past a certain point. He was getting partly frustrated, working 18 hours, six hour days, and he decided he'd take a break. He went to Central Italy, stayed for a few weeks at the 13th Century Francis Kimmonastery, and there he, so the story goes, had a breakthrough, and was able to come back, complete his research, find a vaccine. Later on, when he developed the Salk Institute, he wanted to have a research facility that could emulate that environment that he experienced of inspiration and openness and new ideas.
And so when he collaborated with Louis Kahn, those are the ideas he wanted to instill in it. And now, of course, the space is devoted for biological science, and it's also just an architectural icon. So for you coming here and with your history with Kahn, what are the first things you noticed about the space? And simply, how does it make you feel?
I've been here. This is my fourth time. So I came here when it opened. I think it was 1976.
Made a pilgrimage here, and it's always been an inspiration. But I have a kind of story to tell as well. And that is, I worked for Lawrence Halpern, the landscape architect in San Francisco. When I first came down here to see this, I knew this story that Lawrence Halpern was chosen by Salk to be the landscape architect of this incredible place.
And Kahn, when Halpern arrived, I think the building was still, it was just starting construction. And Kahn said, as soon as Larry Halpern arrived with his magic markers, smelling of benzene, I knew I needed barreggon. And he convinced Salk to let Halpern go and ask Louis Barreggon to come here and do the landscape. And Barreggon came from Mexico City, and they were friends, and they respected each other, Barreggon being also a genius architect.
And when he came, he studied it, and he said to Kahn, Louis, there should be no trees in this plaza. And together, they made this strip of water that hits on the horizon. It's this wonderful moment, of course, near the setting sun where the glowing stream that cuts the plaza merges with the horizon. And that's one of the great magical moments of the space, where this sort of space is carried off over the horizon in an infinite way.
So I always remember, whenever I came here, I remember this connection to Barreggon and his absolute clarity of how to do this. So it's been a great experience coming back and back. It's never disappointing. And I'm really excited because I know Eric Candel.
So you're holding the book, Eric Candel's Reductionism in Art and Brain Science. This is a brand new book that Eric and I both teach at Columbia University. And this is a brand new book that Eric has just published, which is amazing. I just finished half of it on the plane all the way.
I see you're using Eric boarding pass as a bookmark. That's it. And I really recommend this book to anyone in architecture or science or art because it brings these fields together in an amazingly inventive way, very inspiring book, by the way. And so I'm looking forward to tomorrow because I'm trying to speak to these points.
And I made a little, I've been working, you know, I'm never going to be like Eric Candel, but I made a lecture in five points, Environment, Body, Brain and Mind, Concept Phenomena, Psychological Space, Light, Exciting Neural Networks, and City Room, Body and Space. And I divided these, is talking to five topics. I'm trying to connect basically to Candel's work and to the ideas of the conference. And I've never done anything like this.
So it's a big mystery and excitement to me because it's totally new territory. Normally when I give a lecture at university, I'm speaking about my work of usually the recent projects and giving a building in great detail because as an architect, the average time for a building between the first sketches and the opening is eight years. So it's a long process and you could just fill an hour with the work on one building. So I usually don't do a talk like this where I'm not giving a building in detail.
So I'm trying to do something else with this and maybe it's going to be a disaster. I don't know. Well, your audience isn't exclusively architects, which I'm assuming at least at a school like Columbia where you teach you, you're presumed that your audience has architectural sensibility. Here you have neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, psychologists and a whole host of other building designers and architects as well.
But you kind of have to vary your tone and your actual substance to that kind of audience. But that being said, you have done work before in this kind of cognitive aspects of drawing and production of designs. You co-authored a book with Yuhane Palasma, who's been a previous speaker. Questions of perception.
Who gave a keynote, I believe at the last and for conference. So these ideas are certainly not outside of your entire work, really in the purview of how you design and such. So going back to your work with An