Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

Sometimes I just need to feel life, with every one of my pores open. When I came out of the water, I felt completely energized. I felt luminous. Then I got dressed again and walked into the forest just above the beach.

Day 8: The most important thing I noticed today was that only in stillness can we recognize movement.

the gallery should be completely empty. That the public would come in and I would take them gently by the hand and bring them to a wall in the gallery, just to look at the blank space in front of them. That the public would become the performing body instead of me.

Left: Portrait of Maria Callas by Cecil Beaton, 1957; right: my homage to Maria, 2011

make an exact measurement of the frame of Munch’s painting, to re-create the frame in iron, and to place it exactly at that spot in the park—it was called the Ekeberg Hill—where all the citizens of Oslo would be invited to experience The Scream in a new way by standing in front of the empty frame and screaming into the void.

I told him that I don’t believe in sculptures in parks—I think nature is perfect without any art.

Why not (we thought) make MAI itself immaterial—and nomadic? Suddenly we had a new motto: “Don’t come to us—we’ll come to you.” Institutions would call us, and they would pay for us to go there.

The biggest reward of all, for pledging $10,000 or more, was no reward and no mention of your name.

Koolhaas was not only a great architect but a writer and a philosopher. In one of his most famous books, Delirious New York, he wrote, “The city is an addictive machine from which there is no escape.”