Direct interaction could save us a lot of trouble.

Question: What is your counsel?

Richard Meier: Probably the most important way of resolving issues is a face-to-face confrontation . . . is a personal interaction. And far too often, things are left to others to sort of . . . others to try to solve when the principles should be solving . . . these issues by direct interaction. Oh I’m sure we’re doing lots of things right. You know one of the problems is, you know, we dwell on the things that aren’t right. Those are the things that we wanna change. Those are the things that we wanna correct, but there’s an awful lot that’s being done right. And I think in the last seven years in New York City, there’s a whole different attitude about living in this city; about working in this city; about how you interact with the people that you don’t know. And that has to do with just a change of how things are done from the public perspective as well as from a private perspective. As an architect, I can’t say there’s been a great deal of good architecture that’s arisen in this city; but there’s a different attitude about architecture in the city that not ever existed before . . . that has to do with the feeling, “This is our place. It should be great.” And I think that never existed before. You know, “How do we cope?” Now we’re beyond that.

Recorded on: 9/17/07