https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5TvJiSb0YHQ
Hello everybody. What you’re about to see is an interview with Andrew Gould who’s a building designer. I’m making this little introduction because I lost the first about 10 minutes of the interview in terms of video. We do have the audio for the entire interview and so for the first 10 minutes I’ll be putting up images of his work, his building designs, his liturgical designs as well. At about the 10 minute mark then the video will come on and you’ll also keep adding some images as the conversation continues. I had a really great discussion with Andrew Gould. He’s a friend of mine but he’s also someone who I think shows us how to integrate the past with the present in terms of our creative endeavours. Please enjoy the conversation and thank you. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Hello everybody. I would like to introduce you to Andrew Gould. I’m pretty excited. It’s the first time that I’m doing this live discussion with someone directly with them sitting there in front of me. It’s great because Andrew is a long time collaborator of mine. He’s someone whose work I admire very much. We’ve been working together for several years. We started some projects together, the Orthodox Arts Journal and many liturgical arts projects. He’s a building designer, he’s a liturgical designer. He designed several churches and several buildings in Charleston and all over the US. I’m really looking forward to talking with him about art and about beauty and its place in the world and also the type of work that he’s doing. Andrew, just to start, maybe you can tell because people I don’t think might not have heard about you. Maybe you can tell them a little bit about what you do and maybe how you came to where you are in terms of your work. Well, I’m an architectural designer and a liturgical artist. I’m one of these people who’s always known what I want to do. I’ve wanted to be an architect since I was two years old. I started getting introduced to the church when I was a teenager. I actually got introduced to Christianity through playing the pipe organ, which got me into churches. I really fell in love with the music and architecture and the liturgical art of churches. I’ve gone through a long path. I was an Anglican for a long time. About 15 years ago, I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. I specialize in the design of Eastern Orthodox churches, in the design and manufacture of the furnishings for them. I also have a specialty in that I live in the downtown Charleston Historic District here in South Carolina. I design a lot of houses and other buildings within the Historic District that have to fit into the sort of architecture here. I’ve got a number of different things I do, but it’s all kind of medievalist and looking towards the beauty and romance of the past. It’s this kind of a thing that ties it all together. Maybe that would be my first question. What is your approach to the past? The past, for some people, can seem like a burden, something that is very heavy that we need to escape from. Other people are very traditionalist and tied to the past almost in a slavish manner. What is your vision of how the past interacts with us today? How we can make art today thinking about the past and how we live in it? Well, that’s a big question. I’m a great lover of the past. Whenever I can, I travel to old towns, old cities, visit old buildings. I don’t think that building is almost anything old. I just intrinsically love. I’m one of these people who feels like I’m not quite at home in the modern world. Everybody talks about how this is the age of the greatest wealth and comfort and convenience in the history of the world. I suppose I can see that, but it’s awfully hard for me to see that there’s anything particularly beautiful or worthwhile about the modern world and the beauties that I see in the art and architecture of the past. So when I’m designing buildings, I’m always thinking about how it would have been done, supposing somebody in the 19th or 18th or 14th or 9th century, whatever the project is, would have tackled this design project and built that building. I’m always thinking about how would it have been done in those days. That doesn’t mean I’m making copies of old buildings or that I’m using archaic construction techniques. I’m working in the modern age, so I have to design buildings that suit people’s modern needs and are buildable out of modern construction materials. But where possible, I try to create a sort of a story, a romantic fiction, you might say, about how the building could have happened had it been happening in another age, that brings some of that beauty and character that we see in old buildings into buildings nowadays. One of the things that I noticed that is surprising is that although it’s obvious that you’re basing your designs on the past, you can see that you’re using certain patterns, certain proportions, certain materials that are identified with the past, there’s also a kind of buoyancy in what you’re doing. There’s something playful about your buildings and your designs that makes it feel like you’re not exactly like you said, that you’re not directly copying something from the past, but you’re almost as if the past is this giant playground that you jump into and that you connect things together and you create these almost fantastical buildings, but that still feel comfortable, still feel like a home. That’s right. Yeah, and I’m usually playing at least two historical references off of one another in my architecture. Again, because it’s too easy to just copy old buildings, and when people do copy old buildings, they tend to come off as kind of cold and contrived. So I’m very fortunate that I have the specialty designing Orthodox churches, particularly Russian Orthodox churches, because there’s not a whole lot of historical precedent for Orthodox churches in this country. So most of the time when I’m going to be designing a church, I have to come up with a sort of historical question, supposing there’d been Russian Orthodox people in New Mexico in the 16th century designing Russian Orthodox churches alongside the Spanish missions. That’s a really far-fetched historical fantasy, but from an aesthetic standpoint, there’s a solution to that question. It never happened, but had history turned out differently, it might have happened. My own church here in Charleston is the first Orthodox church I designed, and Charleston being an important historic district has a wonderful heritage of how buildings are built, the materials that are used, the general aesthetic character of the buildings, and there’s many different kinds of churches, different denominations in the downtown area. So when I said about designing an Orthodox church for Charleston, I came up with this sort of story. Well, suppose that among the various immigrant groups that were in Charleston, there were Russians, and suppose they built a Russian Orthodox church here in the mid-19th century. That’s not so far-fetched a fantasy. That happened in New York, it happened in San Francisco, it might have happened here if Russians had come here. But if we look at the way Russians built churches in the different corners of the world back when the Russian Empire pretty much stretched from one end of the world to the other, we can get a pretty good sense of how they adapted to local climates, local building traditions, and brought the architectural fashions of the time into those places and built churches that seemed like they belonged there, and I can by extension kind of guess what they would have looked like had they been built here. I think it’s been very successful because people look at the churches I design and feel it, and they say that that looks like it belongs here, it looks like it’s always been here, and in many cases they don’t believe that it’s a new building. They’re just convinced it’s a restoration of an old building in some capacity, which is pretty funny. But it’s interesting because if you… that’s the impression that I get, is that the first impression you get from it is that this is home, this belongs here, there’s something about it that totally fits the environment that it’s there, but then as you spend a bit of time in the space and as you’re looking and you’re circulating the space, there’s something else that comes out which is somewhat this fantastical element that you talk about. To me it seems like the fantastical aspect of the story that you’re telling about the building, that you’re kind of creating this fiction about a building, it appears not just in the story, but it ends up appearing in the building itself. There are quirky details, something about it that makes you dream of something that’s both possible and impossible at the same time. I’ll be showing some images as we’re talking, for example the church that was just built in Greenville for example. It is an orthodox church, but you can see when you look at the way it’s built, with the wood siding and the manner that it feels like it’s a North American building, but the structure of it is so orthodox that joining together feels both completely fantastical but also totally in its place. What I’m getting to is that there is an aspect of it which is innovative. There’s an innovation in the building and in putting it there, but the innovation comes about in a desire to make something which fits the place totally, not out of the artistic temperament of wanting to impose their style. Years ago I gave a talk on the characteristics of orthodox church architecture. I was trying to look at all the orthodox churches in the world and try to come up with some idea of what are the commonalities among them. I observed a peculiar thing that they all exhibit a sense of universality. They all have a quality of imperial Rome. They have an architectural quality to them that seems intrinsic to human civilization, like they could exist absolutely anywhere. That’s one quality orthodox churches tend to have. But they also have the quality of being locally specific. They tend to be extremely expressive of the climate, the geography, the national character of the country they’re built in. On another hand, they seem to always have a tendency to be exotic. If we look back at the first famous great orthodox church, Hagia Sophia, that was built in imperial Rome, and yet it does not use the Roman orders. The columns in that church don’t follow the ancient orders of Doric, Corinthian, Ionic, which is astonishing because the Romans and the Greeks before them had been using those orders for all buildings for a thousand years. All of a sudden Justinian builds the greatest and most important civic building in his entire empire, and it’s just completely bizarre looking. It would have looked utterly strange to people in its time. Instead of having the classic columns and lintels, it’s all arches and domes. Instead of having Corinthian or Ionic columns, it has columns that are called windblown acanthus. They have all of these sort of disorderly, curvaceous shapes in them, and most of these ornamental details are known to have come from the architecture of the Sassanid Persian Empire, which was the great enemy of the Byzantine Romans. They actually chose to ornament their most important civic temple in the style of their eastern enemy. Why did they do this? Well, in part, the Roman Empire at this time, in the sixth century, at the dawn of the Orthodox Church, was struggling to distance itself from its pagan heritage, from that huge bureaucratic weight of the Western Roman Empire. They were trying to be something fresh and new, something exotic. And you see this aesthetic interest going through Orthodox churches through their entire history. A thousand years after Hagia Sophia, Tsar Ivan the Terrible built the famous Cathedral of Basil in Red Square in Moscow. I mean, the strangest looking building in the world with all those onion domes, with the crazy twisty shapes and wild colors and crazy patterns in the brickwork. I mean, as historians, we tend to look back at historic buildings and say, that was the normal way of building back then. It seems strange to us, but it was normal to them. You can’t convince me, looking at St. Basil’s in Red Square, that to 16th century Russians, that building looked normal. That building must have looked as bizarre to them as it does to us. And it was clearly designed to look that way, because they wanted their churches to look like they’re not of this world. They’re part of the Kingdom of Heaven. They’re part of the New Jerusalem. They’re not like your house or my house. They’re not like the bank down the street. They’re not like the building the mayor lives in. They’re from the Kingdom of God. They’re like the ivory palace. So that’s the quality I strive for. Well, three of those qualities, I should say. And I try to make my buildings look universally recognizable as the food of human civilization. I try to make them look like they’re locally meaningful, an expression of their culture. And I try to make them look like they’re not quite from this world. They belong to the realm of story and romance. And as true as this is for Orthodox churches, I think it can be equally true for any kind of building. I think that there’s something about those three qualities that you bring up that really speaks about the Orthodox vision, not just of building but of Christianity itself. You know, being this joining of the divine and the human, but also being at once a Semitic religion, which became the religion of the Roman Empire, and then established itself in the East. And so this kind of desire to join together things that seemed impossible. But I think even more profoundly, there’s something also about the capacity to have something universal, like the structure of an Orthodox church, you know, the dome and the square or the basilica that we use has this very ordered structure. But then you can see all the variations of these buildings where sometimes even that pattern almost disappears within the church. You almost have to know that it’s there. But if you looked at it right away, you wouldn’t get the sense of that. So this joining of the universal in particular seems to me, I mean, it seems to me so much about what Christianity has been in its history. Yeah. And so how do you then translate that, let’s say, to, because building churches is something, but you also work on houses, you create neighborhoods. You try to bring that same thinking, let’s say, into your buildings. That’s right. Right. That’s right. Well, I use a technique when I design a grouping of houses or a whole neighborhood where I try to make it, I try to design it as though it’s evolving over time. Because when we look at a medieval town in Europe, you know, in which we see is just immensely beautiful, nobody designed that town. It just evolved that way, grew that way, almost like a like and like a symbiotic relationship of different things with different agendas. And, you know, one bit somebody would put a house there and then the next guy would come along and he’d build his house next to it. The next guy and the space left over was the street. The street wasn’t straight. It was curving because nobody had really surveyed it out. And, you know, the stores were built where it seemed to make sense to somebody to build the store. And then that building would get torn down. A taller one would be built there. And everybody would be kind of reacting to everybody else. But there was nobody really in charge of it. And this we can easily see looking at European towns creates the greatest beauty. You know, it’s like an icon of civilization, an icon of people living together harmoniously, which is much more beautiful than the sort of fascist, classicist vision of the great city planner who designs everything and people will just live there and they better be happy with it. You know, that produces a certain kind of order that has a kind of beauty of itself, but it’s not exactly the beauty of love. It’s not exactly the beauty of everybody just getting along that we see in a medieval town that was unplanned. But there’s also in the medieval town, there will be something, for example, like the cathedral in the middle or the church in the center, will have a more, let’s say, deliberate aspect to it. Then as you move out into the community, then you have this more organic development of relationship. There’s almost like this hierarchy of relationships. There is a hierarchy. Yeah, you’ll often see in many medieval cities, you’ll see one hilltop has the cathedral, another hilltop has the king’s palace. And so there’s this sort of duality of secular and sacred rule all over the city. But isn’t it fascinating how they completely fail to actually rule the city, that there’s all this total chaos of twisty streets and everything mixed together in between, and the forces of order are trying to push themselves to the top and say, look, look, order, symmetry, and everybody else is just saying, eh, you know, we’re going to do what we’re going to do. And that’s, you know, again, that’s the beauty of human civilization is… The tension between the two. Well, it’s tension that just resolves itself all by itself. And, you know, ultimately it’s a city full of people just, you know, drinking beer in cafes and getting along just fine. You know, that’s the beauty of human civilization that we see in these unplanned medieval cities. So I try to… What I design, I try to keep that kind of relaxed quality, that even if I am the one designing everything, I don’t make it look that way. And the way I do that is I don’t design everything at once. I design the first house, and I just imagine, well, maybe the person who lives in this house, you know, likes both architecture and will make that house really ornate. And I get that house all done, and that’s where it is. And I say, well, let’s suppose the next person comes along and, you know, it’s no longer 1650, you know, it’s 1710. So this person’s going to have a more Georgian classical kind of house. You know, it’s going to be more restrained, more symmetrical, and he’s going to put it right here, you know, and I’ll design that house. And, you know, then the next person comes along. Now it’s, you know, 1840. So, you know, now we’ve got another style, and he’s going to put his house here. And, you know, now it’s the Victorian time, so we’re going to have a house that’s painted really, really, really interesting, Victorian colors with a big front porch, and that one’s going to go there. It’s arbitrary, but the point is I try not to go back. I try not to say, oh, well, because I’ve made this house like that, it would be great if the house at the other end of the street also had a porch to be symmetrical. No, no, no. I just kind of let each thing be its own thing and imagine that the next person’s reacting to that. You know, and I can kind of, I can contrive a street of houses that looks like nobody actually designed it. Right. But the thing is, this is my, I guess this is going to be my next question, is that if I look at your work, you do that, but you don’t come up to the 20th century, or let’s say the later part of the 20th century. That is, you’ve kind of cut that part out, and I’m curious to know why is it that you don’t take as much influence from modern styles or from the kind of post-World War II architecture? Well, part of it’s just practical. The reality is doing a good building in a contemporary modernist style is really hard and really expensive, and not very many clients want that. At least my clients don’t usually want that. There’s other architects who specialize in that. But more philosophically speaking, I think we can see that the architecture of what we might say sort of refined European civilization, the architecture of the late Middle Ages through, you know, the 1940 or so, although it’s a progression of many styles and expresses many, many sort of characters and personalities, it’s basically all a common expression of one idea, one idea of what beauty and harmony and the good life of living in a civic utopia means to European culture, whereas we see a real disjoint with modernistic architecture. It no longer expresses the same anthropology, the…I kind of think of modernism as a philosophy, or perhaps I might even call it a heresy, an anthropological heresy. Basically what modernists and modernist architects believe is that man of nowadays is a fundamentally different creature from man of the old days. They kind of think that man of 1650 and man of 1850 were really the same man, and they were building similar buildings in their ignorance because they didn’t know any better. But man of post-1940 or so is an enlightened being, a sort of godlike person who stands above all of that history, and that nowadays man knows that buildings are machines for living in, that they’re not just works of craftsmanship like they used to be. They’re now a sort of icon of social science, where they’re an expression of how we live our incredibly engineered modern lives. And true modernist believers in modernism like that, they actually think that it’s simply wrong to build traditional buildings. They think that while it was fine for somebody 100 years ago to build a traditional building, that for somebody now to build a traditional building is intrinsically fake, because we’re a different creature. There’s also this idea of progress. That you can’t go back, but that it’s simply alien to our nature. It’s like as alien as if I decided to put a Japanese pagoda in the middle of my street among all my European style houses. It’s like that’s not of our culture, that has nothing to do with us anymore, it’s not ours. That’s what they see with the kind of traditional buildings that I design, is that it’s somehow failing to show that modern man is a different person than historic man. Well of course as Christians we can’t believe that. As Christians we believe that God created man as image, and that image is unchanging, and that man today is the same as man yesterday, no matter how many delusional totalitarian theories of reshaping the world in our image we may invent. We’re the same people we used to be, and the same things are beautiful to our eyes as used to be. So for that reason I have a philosophical problem with modernism. That doesn’t mean I don’t think that good modernist buildings are beautiful. I love many modernist buildings, but I find them beautiful in the same kind of way that I find clockwork mechanisms, and circuit boards, and fine machinery, and all sorts of things that are very alien to our organic human nature. Many of these things are extremely beautiful, but as beautiful as I find a polished brass clockwork mechanism, I don’t really want to live in that. It’s a marvel to behold, but it’s not really the natural expression of our human nature to live in or to worship in. And there is something about this alienation, or the modern alienation that everybody is experiencing. Everybody gets this sense of this alienation from our communities, from the thing that has given meaning to civilization for so long. And it seems like you can see it in the way that, first of all, how cities are planned, most of it, this urban sprawl, these suburban houses built at infinitum without any town center, without anything bringing them together, but also just these houses all next to each other, all made of the cheapest material they can. There’s a lack of understanding of how the place we live in participates in our life, in our identity, in our community, and so they don’t seem to care about thinking about these things. Well, yeah, and you’re right. If you ask me what the architectural problem of the world is, it’s not seriously modernistic buildings. Seriously modernistic buildings are relatively rare. The problem is just mundane architecture that people don’t really think of as art at all. Just one of the most suburban houses, which are mostly traditionally styled in a very superficial way, but they completely fail to capture that character, that ethos of buildings of centuries past. And unfortunately the whole industry of design and building of houses and of the infrastructure that connects them has been so detached from tradition through the broad influence of modernism in the later 20th century that it’s very, very difficult to get back there. Although I work hard to make my buildings look like they just grew there and nobody really designed them. In fact, the only way I can get them built and get them to have that character is if I take absolute control over every little detail and just insist that everything be done exactly as I dictate. It’s a strange paradox, but in the 19th century you could just give a builder a set of plans that just shows a rectangular house with four rooms and six windows on the front, and he’d build it beautifully and it would look great. Nowadays, anything that you don’t dictate gets built all wrong and gets built the ugliest possible way. So yeah, I have to be quite the fascist architect in order to achieve the look of nobody having designed it. Also, the irony about your buildings is that because we live in this world that is so grey or so plastic that when someone encounters the building, it’s this wonder, surprise. It’s almost like opening up a fairy tale book or opening up some forgotten mystery that we haven’t encountered before. So although your buildings are in a certain manner, they try to have this kind of no-one-design them, but they also end up being this total surprise to people. I mean, I have seen people come to the church here in Charleston for the first time and you can just see in their eyes that it’s like they’re children again and they’re walking into a story, exactly, and you get that sense. So that’s also a paradox. It’s something which is trying to be so part of the landscape, so integrated and ends up having the opposite effect just because we live in such a banal, boring world. Well, yeah, and it’s a shock to people to see that such beauty can still be created nowadays because so many people have resigned to the experience that everything new is bland and boring. And yeah, it’s true. When seeing a new building that’s as beautiful as a historic building gives people a special pleasure and a special appreciation that they actually wouldn’t see in the historic building. It gives you hope. Well, it does, and it also gives you a sense of ownership. It’s like seeing other people’s children do something that children do. That’s what children do. But seeing your own child draw their first drawing, you know, oh, it’s amazing. That’s the best thing I ever saw, you know, because it’s yours. Yeah, so it gives people a very particular and unexpected joy to come into one of these buildings and when it finally sinks in, that this is actually a completely new building, they’re quite shocked and very happy about it, visually. Yeah, and I think that that’s something that what I’ve felt is the same in our work that we’ve been doing together, that the designs that we’ve worked on, you know, that we’ve had a mix of your designs and my carvings, and we brought things together, I get the same sense. I get the sense that we’re looking at an object which is totally traditional. The things we’ve done are totally traditional. No one can complain about that we’re trying to somehow, you know, innovate or insert our own ideas or whatever. But when you look at them, there’s this complete surprise at the same time. And when I show people what we’re doing, I get that sense. I show people, you know, people I meet on the street who ask me what I’m doing, and I say, you know, I make religious art. I kind of downplay it really and I say, I’m a religious carver and I make… People, first of all, they don’t believe you, they think, yeah, that doesn’t exist anymore. Here in North America, that’s not possible. And then if they have their phone or anything, I say, go on my website and they look at the carvings and they can’t believe it. They have this sense of surprise, you know, not… Because we’ve seen religious art being made today, which you look at it and you just want to pass by. But there’s something about… I think it really is the same desire that you expressed at the beginning, this desire to both capture something universal, but also join it with something very particular, something that is very grounded, and that little hint of something no one’s ever seen before, like something, a little bit hint of that. Yeah, even the carvings that we’re doing now, this mix of stones and everything, you know, no one has ever done that before. It’s actually totally new. We don’t have historical examples of it, but when you look at them, you think, you feel totally at home, you feel like, yeah, this is something that should have been made a thousand years ago, maybe it wasn’t, but here it is being made today. So, yeah, I always feel like we’re the luckiest people in the world when we’re doing what we’re doing. Like, who… I wouldn’t have thought that it was possible, so it’s great that we’re able to do it. So what is your… I mean, I think that that’s maybe something to talk about, because one of the things that I feel is happening is that there is a renewal of interest in some of these, this vision. We’ve seen it in something in the hipster movements, you know, in the steampunk aesthetics, that we’ve seen this desire to recapture the old world in a manner which is both connected to it, but also there’s a freshness to it at the same time. So maybe you can talk a little bit about how you see that, because here in Charleston there is the school of… How is it the school of… The American College of the Building Arts. Yeah, yeah, there’s this new college in Charleston that I serve on the advisory board. It’s the American College of the Building Arts, and it’s a liberal arts four-year undergraduate college, and it grants degrees in timber framing, architectural carpentry, blacksmithing, plastering, masonry, bricklaying, stone carving. They’ve now just added a major in classical drafting, classical architecture drafting. Decorative finishes is coming next. So students can actually go there to get a bachelor’s degree in college and come out with this practical skill set that gets them, lets them immediately get a job and work at a very high level in these fields. This college has, I think, the highest job placement rate of any college in America. I mean, everybody who comes out of this college immediately gets a well-paying job in their field of choice, because there’s so much need for people who can do these things, not only for restoring old buildings, but for building new buildings. And there’s a shortage of craftsmen who can do it, but there’s a big revival of interest in it. There’s quite a lot of architects who design good traditional buildings and need people who can build these things. Yeah, I’m quite heartened, actually. I think things are getting better, not worse, with regards to the quality of design and craftsmanship. You may have to know where to look. It may only be a tiny, tiny, minuscule percentage of all the work being done that’s actually good, beautiful work. But if you look in the right place, if you look for it, the work being done nowadays is as good as any work that’s ever been being done. And there’s more and more people every year who know how to do it. Of course, we see this in our field of Orthodox liturgical arts. I mean, the iconography and the architecture being done in the Russian church right now, in many ways, is better than it ever has been, better than it was centuries ago, which is astonishing to see that it can flourish in this day and age to that extent. The same is true of many kinds of craftsmanship. And it’s fed by, as you said, this larger interest among the hipster generation in the retro aesthetic. It often takes a superficial form. We can see it in graphic design and in the posters for events that look like they’re out of the Old West or out of the Roaring 20s and here in Charleston, every new bar and restaurant looks like it’s from the 1920s. It’s all marble and polished brass, and bartenders wearing vests and bow ties and playing swing dance music and so forth. It’s really charming to see, because that’s a beautiful aesthetic, and it actually means something. I can see the appeal of it, because you don’t have to invent yourself. If you’re drawn to that aesthetic, you can put on the outfit, and you can step into that bar, and you can order that cocktail, and all of a sudden there’s a whole galaxy of aesthetic references and romantic associations that you put onto yourself, that you can enjoy that evening. That is so much more fun than the modern vision of a building. It’s just a white box, and you have to invent everything from scratch. Who has the time for that? Who has the time to invent their entire self-image and aesthetic taste? Ex nihilo. That’s hilarious. Maybe the last question I’d like to ask you is tell me a little bit about the beer store. One of the things that you did in Charleston is that you designed the beer store. It’s marvelous. On one hand, it’s a crazy space. You walk in there and it feels completely surreal, but it also has that same feeling of also feeling like it’s been there forever, or that it just belongs there. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about how you thought of this, how you were able to think of even proposing a beer store that would look like that. It’s funny. There’s a developer here in Charleston who had built a very fine restaurant, Edmunds Host, and he gave it kind of an 18th century historical reference in its name and in its style of design. Then he decided they wanted to open a craft beer and wine store attached to the restaurant, and they wanted it to be kind of a showpiece of architecture because he owns a lot of property in the neighborhood and wants to bring up the standards of development in this formally industrial area that doesn’t have a lot of good buildings. Anyway, he asked me to design the beer and wine store and pretty much gave me carte blanche to do anything I wanted, which is very unusual. I give him a lot of credit for having that vision that just a beer store could be the building that brings up the whole neighborhood and makes it an actual center of commercial life for blocks around, but that was his idea. I basically put into practice all of the ideas I’ve developed for designing orthodox churches because a lot of them just happen to apply really well here. The idea that you don’t have any windows on the walls, that the light comes down from above through a cupola worked really well because we needed the walls to be lined with shelving instead of having windows on them. I did the whole interior in timber frame because I’m not really sure how to explain it, but everybody seems to intuitively know that beer goes with timber frame. It’s just so obvious to people. The appearance of all the bottles of beer and wine on the shelves is so beautiful because they all have different colored labels and different shaped bottles. I realized I don’t need any color in this building because the beer and wine bottles give all of the color and texture. I did everything on the inside in just oiled pine. I wanted the details to look really hand-made, so the closer you get up to the shelves and to the timbers, you can just see everybody’s craftsmanship. I designed these turned columns to hold up all of the shelves, over 300 of them, that this local lady who’s a woodturner made on her lathe. Then the outside, I did the building in solid masonry. I used salvaged antique brick to build the arches because I wanted it to have that organic quality that old brick has that’s really hard to find in new brick. I had to teach the masons how to do that because they’d never actually built big structural arches out of brick because nobody does that anymore. It was a really fun project. I coordinated all the craftsmen, many of whom were from the College of the Building Arts. They built the timber framing and all the interior carpentry for me. When you go in there, it feels like you’re walking into an alchemical store or something that’s selling magical functions. Yes, it does seem that way because it really shows off. The bottle is almost as artwork that way, but not like a modern white painted art gallery, but more like artwork going into the chamber of exotic treasures in a Baroque aristocrat’s palace. That’s kind of the quality I wanted. Everything seems fun and mysterious. It’s funny because the space has such formality with the cupola and the extreme symmetry of the timber frame in there and everything being handmade. People react really quite peculiarly when they go in there. For one thing, they go in there and they have hushed voices like when they go into a church. They kind of realize that there’s something almost sacred about there and they don’t want to talk loudly. They just look and then they won’t leave. Especially when the store first opened and people were all in there. For the first time, there was this funny phenomenon where people would go in and they’d buy their beer and they’d be standing there and they’d have their basket and they’d have bought it and they’d just be standing there. And then some salesperson would come up to them and say, do you need anything? Can I help you? And they’d say, oh, I guess I was leaving. It just kept happening and happening and the store was full of people just standing there looking at it and not knowing what they’re supposed to do next. It’s kind of like at a church service where nobody will leave until the priest gives the dismissal and it’s time to leave. They want to be told it’s time to go. That’s right. It’s okay. It’s a funny phenomenon. That’s amazing. That’s totally amazing. Well, it shows you the power of what architecture can do, that’s for sure. That’s right. Alright, Andrew, thank you so much. Thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. We’ll have to figure out another discussion. One of the things you wanted to talk about, which I said we shouldn’t, is the relationship between orthodoxy and piracy. And so maybe our next discussion could be something… Andrew even actually brought his pirate hat. I was hoping we were going to have time to discuss that. So, I brought my hat. Our next conversation is going to be about the relationship between orthodoxy and piracy. I promise you guys. So, thanks, Andrew. It was great to have you. Alright, thank you, Jonathan.