As a child, I grew up in both New York City, but also New England in the forest. And so it was a kind of double life. And particularly the forest and streams and fields of New England intrigued me as a child. And I cave explored, and I fished, and I looked into little tiny streams and imagined those tiny fish were great salmon in a river. And I imagined living under a boulder that we had near the house that had hollows under the stone. And visited one cave that I found with the help of my dad. And a fox lived in there. And so there were many bird bones because the fox would catch birds and the fox and I think the fox's family would have a meal. All of that mystery was intriguing. And on the other hand, the city had its own special life. Many more people and interesting nature of places in the city. It's interesting, for instance, to remember or to see what you remember clearly and what you don't about places. And it's probably a good lesson about being an architect. You know, why was something so clear and other things not at all clear?

And I went to a great high school, a private school. I had a scholarship; my dad was out of a job. And so I got very good training there. And then, of course, you have to decide a bit more of what you're gonna do. And I thought I'd be an architect, and fortunately, within a week, I knew I'd found the perfect thing that I could do well, that I just loved. It had to do with senses of places, and it had to do with the sense of how people are in those places, whether they're a place among buildings or a stream, such as the one I live next to in Connecticut, where it is the smell of the place, and it's the sense of the breeze and the sense of the light shifting. And in the case of my childhood, developing a kind of empathy with a trout and knowing where they would be and how they would be and touching the trout.