In other words, you've got a journey as the plot, but it has to be in a lively environment, being able to create the mood. If you read "Pickman's Model," in other words, they're winding their way through the Boston Streets and [H.P.] Lovecraft researched what was there.

Forms of energy from nature gave my father trouble. He refused to believe he was going to die. He had these weird delusions. It's amazing. Along with all the great thoughts, he had all this funny stuff.

Any sort of working drawings are simply diagrams. Architecture encourages your imagination to work that way.

[Buckminster Fuller] was quite a Newtonian in certain ways. But he was an excellent inventor and kept people on their toes.

The tetrahedron was [ Buckminster Fuller's] big thing. He'd talk about it in the same way Plato talked about angles.

I think [Nikola Tesla] was always like that. And so it was inevitable that he would be an inventor. Because it was so easy for him to think fourth-dimensionally, dynamically. It wasn't just a static thing with him. In other words, it isn't the way an architect thinks, which is essentially static.

I began to analyze the movie [The Day the Earth Stood Still] and said it was really made out of these two characters [Nikola Tesla and Leon Teremin] who were brought together. That made it fascinating to me. And especially the language they made up, that Klaatu speaks. Because it has a Latin word order. It's like medieval Latin, but it had some Navajo phonemes in it and that kind of stuff.