(bright electronic music) (ethereal music) (insects chirping) - I see myself first of all as a human being, and probably secondly as someone who's in love with life, and next probably as a sculptor.

I think my talent is that I can work with a great many things and cross over lines that are not usually crossed over.

When I was a kid, I really didn't understand adults very well.

But I did understand, and I felt very at home with, nature.

So, it's probably been the major influence in both my life and my work.

And I don't feel at all separate from nature.

(ethereal music) (bird chirping) (insects chirping) (banging) (crunching) (banging) I'm moving slowly towards you.

(ethereal music) Art is silence at the beginning and trusting oneself.

The techniques and the discipline are the tools to make this trusting become live and real.

(ethereal music) Sculpture is different painting because it has the dimensions all the way around it, and ideally the different views should give you different messages.

It involves time, and in that sense it's closer to music.

(ethereal music) (water rippling) I don't really think that things in life are separate the way we so often separate things.

I think also that sculpture and architecture are closer than we think.

All the years that we've lived here in the mountains east of San Diego and have been building our home, I've really come to find out that the houses are really sculptures that you can live in.

(ethereal music) When I design a building, I begin it very much from how it would feel, from the senses: the mass of the building, what the light would be through and arbor or walking through a door, what that would feel like, and then I design around that feeling.

(ethereal music) The uniqueness of the land here I've considered a gift that was very precious.

The shape of the land, how the mountains were, what type of trees, where the wind blowed, those all were things that I considered when I was designing here.

(ethereal music) I try never to come with a preconceived idea of what the building should be.

The particulars of the building, who the people are, what the location is, suggest a type of a language.

That's what I'm looking for.

That's the vocabulary of the whole building.

And that's what gives you to key of everything from the main structure to the details in the building.

(ethereal music) I use a lot of different materials in different ways and very closely together, things like tile and cement and wood and brick.

I've never understood matter and spirit as being separate.

In the same way, I can never understand that materials can't be on friendly terms with each other.

(ethereal music) What really got me interested in stained glass was when I was quite young and I saw that Notre Dame in Paris and the way the light came in and filled this whole structure with this marvelous light.

It's so different from painting and sculpture, which is separate from you, that you look at.

It's much, much more like music, which comes out and touches you, and it actually wraps around you.

(ethereal music) I don't really believe in style.

I think that the main thing that an artist is trying to do is to be honest with what's inside of themself.

If they can do that, if they can build from what their heart tells them, then what they do will be right.

(ethereal music) If I could have one wish with my own work, it would be to be able to make architecture as beautiful as Mozart wrote his music.

(ethereal music) - James and I have lived here for about 30 years, and I think the sense of the sculptural quality of it, something that you can feel with your whole body as you move through it, has grown on me, and I like the way the building doesn't argue with nature.

It feels comfortable, as if nature and it are happy together.

(chattering) Once a year we have an open house, and when people come, some of them are just sort of off in another world.

And I've often thought that, for many people, their imaginations are starved for something new to stimulate them.

- And the height of it is an advantage for them as a site, because they can drain the water out in emergency, if they had a fire or something.

And the gazebo, that's a foamed, urethane foam covered with concrete, and there's a beautiful art piece up through the center.

- Ooh, I like the jewel-like kind of open light.

(gentle harp music) - [Wife] I think people have a sense that they can go home and look at their own place and find their own solutions and make their own spaces richer and more alive by some gift they have inside themselves that they haven't thought about enough that exists in their imagination.

(machinery rumbling) (chattering) - When we start with a building site as unique as the gift that it has to give you, if you level it, like we so often do, you lose those qualities.

It's like trying to change a good friend so that they have nothing left to give you.

The first thing I try to do is understand the client, the site, and all of the implications having to do with that particular job.

Then I try to understand the language of the building.

And then I begin to work three-dimensionally, usually with a small sculpture to develop the form of it.

(spraying) The skill of the craftsmen that you're working with has to be considered when you're doing designing.

If the work is gonna have to be done by people that are not skilled, you have to design it so it'll look right even if it's crooked.

But if you have a really tremendous mason, you can do a lot more things that are regular and more controlled, because if you ask him to do a bunch of wobbly lines, he's likely to have a heart attack.

(machinery grinding) I don't think of a building in the absolute sense that at some one point it's reached its pristine point when it's finished.

To me it's much more of an organic structure.

It's something that has its life that continues on after it's been built.

(ethereal music) (water rippling) A building to me is like a tree.

It's something that has its own life in it, the process of building and the people living in it.

And just like a tree is, if the branch falls off, it's still a good tree.

It's that process of life that's more exciting to live in.

(ethereal music) I try not to work intellectually, but the reason, the part that checks what you're doing, is very important.

It's not the right and the left side of the brain; it's the two sides working back and forth continually.

(ethereal music) Very often in architecture schools, the architects are taught in a systems approach how to take parts and put them together.

I don't work that way.

To me the idea of the building is like a seed.

From the seed the building grows and becomes real.

(ethereal music) Some of these, remember we talked about the value of the two different glasses.

Do you think that there's enough value change in the two of them?

- Yeah, but I think we should also bring some lighter in.

- Into the smaller pieces around this section of the window.

Okay?

- Uh-huh.

Do you still want to use quarter-inch up here?

- That's a good idea.

The quarter here and then the 3/8, 3/16 on this part.

Odin, if you notice that the ... The apprentice system is such an old method of teaching that's been around for a long, long time, particularly in the arts and the crafts.

It's not as prevalent, not used as much now.

I think that being around a really good artist and watching the process, watching somebody make mistakes and decisions, is a much more direct way of learning about a craft or about art.

(tool whirring) When you do get a job working with a community or on a larger job that's a public art type of thing, the main difference is that the client is a whole group of people rather than a family.

And in the same sense that, with a family, you're trying to understand them, in a sense you're trying to understand, let's say, this hospital and the myth of where this is and who the people are.

It's just a broader kind of view of things.

When I design, I still think of the individual.

It's not general people that are walking through the door that I'm interested in; it's the little lady that's coming in on the wheelchair for the first time and is afraid of being in the hospital.

That's who I'm building the work for.

(ethereal music) There's really very many ways that public art really influences the community.

Because the public art is smaller and closer to the human being and often made by human hands, the impersonality of a large city can be softened.

(ethereal music) It's also can create a space which becomes livable for people, something that becomes part of their myth of life.

(ethereal music) The artist is the kind of person who ... We all, when there's problems, we suffer with them.

But the artist is the kind of person that has to make something from that, and so what he functions as is sort of a raw nerve for the culture, and he transfers that ... change which is going about into an object.

Whether it's pollution or overpopulation or war, he needs to reinterpret the myth of the culture.

The problem that we've had is that we've treated the artist so much as a play toy to the rich that we ... we haven't made use of the gifts that the artist can give to all of us.

So we started the Ilan-Lael Foundation to give them a forum and a vehicle so that they could contribute.

(chattering) Putting on a sculpture show is one of the easiest ways to get people together: politicians, artists, teachers, lawyers, so that they can talk to each other and find out what they really care about, and all kinds of wonderful things happen when people get to know each other.

- And come up with another idea and insert it right back into the hole.

Born.

And so maybe next time-- - [Hubbell] I felt that, with the foundation, it would be easier for artists to begin to contribute to the total community.

- And they seem to be emphasizing a north-south link between the park and the bay, whereas the country seems to be emphasizing an east-west link along Cedar Street, and they seem to be two-- - [Hubbell] The meetings that we have which deal with specific issues with things like parks and green belts and things like that try to foster and to push in ways that we can the human elements, the aesthetic things, the things that the artist are mostly concerned with.

- Just like with San Antonio, when they did their whole riverfront development and put the symphony across and did that, it really sparked, I think, an awareness of green belts through the city itself.

And I think this would be dynamic, because it's just like-- - [Hubbell] Sometimes by getting together in smaller groups that are dealing with specific issues, we can try to get the cities to be more human and try to push that quality of life, whether it's an article in the paper or a proposal that you put before the mayor, something specific.

- Functional business venues, but also that park ambience and some public art to develop a whole feel for the space that makes people feel safe and comfortable there so that people from the satellite communities will come and spend time in the urban area.

(siren wailing) (anxious music) (car horn honking) - I think that what alienates people often about a city is that connection of size.

When you don't have the human scale, what you do is you retreat inside yourself, and instead of making the connection to the city, you go inside and look out at it.

(anxious music) For a long time, our culture has understood life by trying to separate things by looking at small parts of it, and we carry that through in our planning and architecture.

The result of having the building not make the connection with people is that they see it as separate from themself, because it is, it's not connected.

And all of those things add up to people feeling uninvited to the city.

(gentle music) I think that we have to learn to trust all of our dreams more, and for the decision maker to trust the dreams of the artist.

(gentle music) And hopefully, with that kind of trust, we can make the cities more habitable and more exciting to live in.

(scraping) (blows) To be an artist is a gift.

And not to act on the dreams that you have is almost immoral.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program was provided by The Lloyd and Ilse Ruocco Fund of the San Diego Community Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the following foundations and individuals.

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