 | | | | | |
| |||||
 | |||||
| |||||
| You just have to keep going downhill? "If you want to bring somebody back to see a certain painting, you have to take the elevator to the top and go back down the ramp." You mean you can't walk in the wrong direction? "Oh you can. But most people don't. Even so, you see the paintings in a certain order." How does the Exploratorium allow people to make their own decisions? "The Exploratorium had architects who wanted us to do our offices with low partitions that formed little work cubby holes that have shelves with plants. They wanted our office to look like that. They took me to one which they thought was so good. Everyone was working away in their cubby holes. Suddenly, I yelled something out loud and everybody popped up out of their holes. I told the architects, 'See what would happen? I wouldn't be able to yell.' The architect answered that a place such as this teaches people to talk softly. Hell, I don't | want to be taught -- or to teach anyone -- to talk softly. They said another thing like that about doing a certain thing to stop the kids from running inside the museum. Well, why should we stop the kids from running? I had a hell of a time convincing them that they really weren't doing any harm. They hardly ever ran into anybody, but it was just sort of something a little bit out of control and so it worried them to let the kids behave naturally. I think it's quite wonderful that we don't mind loosing some control. So there again was something that I liked -- I like to see the kids run -- and I had to impress my aesthetic on the place. For the architects, it wasn't even an aesthetic question" Perhaps it was more a question of being sued. "One must make decisions like that. The way a place is comes about from making decisions about many details. The general view is that an executive should not pay attention to all these details. I don't think that's the right way to be. It doesn't work when you are doing experiments and it doesn't work in art." | ||||