[RV] I’ve written an essay or two on… and lecture about… on how Louis Kahn was influenced by a lot of the young people around him, which is perfectly all right. I think very often, teachers are influenced by their students, but, he never… he never recognised that, which I think was not nice at all. I remember once… I remember once attending with Denise Scott Brown, I think it was in the mid ‘60s, a lecture by Louis Kahn that he was giving in the Art Alliance and right in the middle of the lecture I realised, half the buildings he was showing were directly influenced by me, in many, in certain ways. And we went out and sat in the, sort of, springtime. We sat in Rittenhouse Square and I just sort of fell apart when I realised this… this was a guy that I had admired so much. But other people, it happened the same way to other people with Louis Kahn.  That’s another whole subject, which doesn’t really connect.

Could you be specific about what he took from you?

[RV] Well, I’m kind of forgetting details like that, but he took from me the idea of the enclosed space, he took from me the idea of… he influenced me too… the idea of the servant space. He took from me the idea of layering and I should go back to my article, since I wrote it as an article I’ve got it out of my system, so I haven’t thought about it much anymore. But I gave it as a lecture, I think, the first time in Japan and wrote… wrote a…

One story is that you put mother’s house where you did, so he’d have to look at it every morning.

[RV] No, the other, the other… there was… what reminded me of that influencing was that in that house up the street, that I forget the name of, you can look out of the window and see the chimney coming up behind the window, and that was my idea indirectly. That was one of the things that kind of… that kind of influenced me.  So he did do a lot of that.

You can see that house tomorrow too.

[RV] Yeah, yeah, it’s an interesting house actually. But then later, I just didn’t go along with what he was doing. He was… when I was going into the appropriateness of acknowledging the everyday, acknowledging the… the… what do you call the everyday, there’s another word for it?

[DSB] Conventional building?

[RV] The convention, let’s say convention. He was being… doing architecture that was very ‘original’, which it really wasn’t and ‘very, very monumental’, in a period where… where monumentality was not appropriate, I thought.  A lot of the work he did in Asia after that… So I’ve written all about this and it was sort of a sad evolution where I loved the guy, discovered the guy in a way, was with Anne Tang and eventually I became very disillusioned. And… but it is interesting that many, many, many years later he is still very fashionable and talked about a lot, and, and directly influences people. There were a couple of people who started… who started a practice a while back in Philadelphia who worked here, who said twice in a… in a Philadelphia paper, we worked for Venturi Scott Brown, but we are influenced in our work by Louis Kahn, which is all right.