I had a lot of fun designing The Shops at Nanuet in New York state. I was designing with a great friend named Vlad, and our styles were diametrically opposed, which is just what the project needed. The history of the place was it attracted people who wanted to live in the pastoral, sublime Hudson River Valley, while having quick access to the glamour and excitement of Manhattan. At the turn of the last century, many who lived there were in the theater. Our solution was to contrast two 'actors' – what we called the earthy, solid, heavy, “Hudson River Valley artists” (American landscape as the ineffable manifestation of God), and bold, bright, light “Urban Machine of Manhattan” (industrial progress for the betterment of society). Our architecture was the 'theater' at which this duality played out. It didn’t matter if the community knew that story, what mattered is it unified the architectural decisions and became a central part of their neighborhood. I’m going to ‘cheat’ here and add a second project, for which I won the annual Leonard B. Willeke Design Prize at the University of Michigan, changing my life as a designer. The competition that year was to design a wall in seven days, which I struggled with for five days, not liking the idea of a wall and what it represented. I had been reading in humanities about “the eyes being the windows to the soul” and I decided to design a window instead of a wall--to bring people together in lieu of separating them. I was also reading Teilhard de Chardin (a French philosopher, scientist, and Jesuit priest), and was fascinated with the idea of humankind becoming one being as we advanced in our evolution. Now, I only had two days to build it, with pieces of mirror and window combined. When you looked through the glass, you saw slices of your face and the person on the other side simultaneously. In essence you were blending each other's faces into one while looking deeply into each other's eyes. It was a very intimate object and during the competition’s award presentation, the jurors were very moved. I won a cash award, a New York job offer with one of the jurors, it was published, and it later became a children’s toy in science museums. image: The Shops at Nanuet