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MM: In graduate school I had become fascinated with American architecture and the American scene. I started to do research on what an American art form meant to this country for two hundred years, and by that I definitely do not mean Norman Rockwell. I traveled a lot around the country for a number of years, every chance I could, and saw a lot of both landscape and architecture. It actually helped me to made sense
out of Europe when I went back, because you could then see it in relationship to something else. It certainly was not similar, but it gave you a sense of the progression and transition from Europe, across the Atlantic to the East Coast cities, to Chicago and finally to the West Coast. That was a very fascinating time. In the end, my graduate
thesis was a lot about the sense that the American landscape and scene were something incomplete. You could create a fairly strong and very defensible argument that the landscape we wanted as a culture was in fact a landscape of incompleteness. That meant that it was in process, that there was work being made, and that there was a sense of optimism in that idea. While it might not have been beautiful very often, what it actually meant and what people saw in it and what it represented was something very different, the kind of creation of the ideals of democracy. That is one of the reasons we ended up moving to Los Angeles, that it was the epitome of a city in that you could make anything here and it was okay. The important thing was the fact that you were making, not so much WHAT you were making. That is fraught with all sorts of hellish issues for the city, but if you believe that this idea is somewhat fundamental to the American psyche, then to a certain extent this is what it represents.
V5: I absolutely agree, it is an unpredictable reflection. Historically the city was structured on a closed set of rules, everything was supposed to grow and change in a clear way. But there was a shift. It has become this thing that is not set in an agreed rule base.
MM: There is a kind of intangible or indefinable element that I try to get into the work. After we have satisfied the program and chosen good materials and detailed the building well, there is something else there when you go through the whole list of what we expect the building to be as a piece of architecture. The final moment for me as to whether it is good and true and strong and rates the way I believe our work to be, is that you look at the design and it has this kind of flickering quality that it is not complete but somehow desires to be. In both that desire to be complete but the impossibility of that actually happening, there is a
real sense of openness and inclusion and a real sense of optimism and light in it. That is an indefinable quality, but it is finally the last check mark that needs to be there for me to believe that the project is a good project.
V5: Did you go from school to Frank Gehry's office?
MM: I went to the Harvard Graduate School of Design and was still very much in a kind of art school, undergraduate state of mind. As an
undergraduate, I always felt like the students ran the school and they happened to invite the instructors to come. Then at Harvard it was the
exact opposite, it was quite clear that the school was run by the faculty and the students were allowed to sit in their chairs for awhile (laughs).
V5: Who were the key personalities at the GSD when you were there?
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MM: Peter Rowe was very influential on me because he was doing a lot of work on the American city. Also Jorge Silvetti, whom I had also known in undergraduate school (I ended up working for Machado and Silvetti for a number of years on and off between semesters when they were still a small office). Raphael Moneo was new as the head of the department when I started, and by the time I left he was a real presence at the school. I think his presence and the kind of ethic that he brought to the school, and the ethical demands that he made on your work as a student,
were really awakening and very intense. It was shocking because he was asking you to look very deep inside yourself, kind of like going to
confession, which is why I think everyone used to refer to him as the priest. He made you look deep inside yourself and decide if the work you
were making was true or not. A man named John Whiteman was very influential and was teaching mostly theory classes at the time. I had
Robert Mangurian for one semester and which probably, more than anything, developed my infatuation with what could be possible on the
West Coast. He looked at architecture in a way that was more similar to a lot of the artists that I had as instructors at RISD. The way that he spoke about architecture and design seemed familiar and really
enjoyable. Those were probably the key people. The thing about that school that was amazing was that almost everybody who came through the
East Coast stopped there for a lecture or impromptu talk. So you were exposed to a great number of great minds on a very impromptu basis and I thought that was very valuable. I spent a lot of time in the Carpenter Center because I was doing quite a bit of painting and printmaking at the time. That was the fine arts building; it was a real treat to get to know that building.
I finished my thesis, and my wife Amy had just finished some teaching in Boston. We both felt like we wanted out of Boston. If you wanted to be
at all contrary, you couldn't be more contrary in Boston than say you were moving to Los Angeles. (laughs) Most people think that the number
666 follow Los Angeles or that the devil incarnate lives out here. In fact my father-in-law offered to pay our moving expenses to any other city in the country if we wouldn't move to Los Angeles! (laughs) That, of course, just stoked the fires even further. So we bought a pickup truck and packed as much stuff as we could. We went from Boston along the coast to Florida then up into New Orleans, then through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona then Los Angeles.
By the time we got here, we had been on the road for about three months and by then it looked like the most beautiful place on the planet. (laughs) I didn't have a job so I sent out a series of resumes. I didn't want to work for Frank Gehry because I had been working for a lot of small firms as a designer (Machado and Silvetti, and Schwartz/Silver) so
I wanted to have an equivalent level of experience, but in a larger firm to work on bigger projects. I thought I would work for a firm like SOM or HOK. Since we were also running out of money, I also sent out resumes to a bunch of other people. Frank's office was the first to call me back because they were looking for a designer to replace somebody who had left a few months earlier.
V5: Was this at a time when everyone was sleeping on his doorstep?
MM: Yes, it was the summer of 1988. They were just starting the Disney Hall competition. They asked if I would be the designer on the competition, and I thought, this project is big enough (laughs) -- even bigger than what I was looking for. I thought that we were never going
to win it. And I figured if we do not win, fine, there are some other interesting projects in the office. So I thought if we didn't win and they ran out of projects, they were probably going to kick me out anyway because we lost. But we ended up winning and that was the beginning of eight years there and designing a number of projects there.
V5: What were some of the other projects?
MM: I was the primary project designer for the Toledo Museum of Art School, which Greg Walsh was also very involved in. Others were the University of Cincinnati, the Molecular Biology Lab and a project called EMR, which was an electrical company headquarters in Germany.
V5: The Disney Concert Hall was an amazing project.
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