I wrote a little book called Screening History , in which I go in great detail into the movies that affected me growing up. This was in the years of puberty, and so on. The Prince and the Pauper , based on Mark Twain’s novel with the Mauch twins in it. All of the propaganda films I loved, because they were political.

Well, it certainly influences my manner of writing, because I always see Darwin as a model of the act of explanation and of argument; the morality, the ethics of explanation, maybe.

Most scientists do. Of course there are the classical figures. I might talk about Einstein a little bit, for example. Now, when I was in college, I was taking my second course in physics, I remember very well, and it had a chapter on relativity. And I took this relativity on a vacation in the mountains; my family went with me. And I remember very well sitting on a rock up in the hills there overlooking a stream, reading this relativity derivation. And it was just very exciting and interesting. It was a strange new world, relativity. I even thought I had found where Einstein made a mistake. And I went back for lunch, and I thought about it, came back. And I said, “No, he was right after all,” but it was still very exciting. To see a completely different kind of idea and world from what one’s normal intuition shows. Of course, Einstein was one of the great scientists; I’ve always admired him. I fortunately had a chance to talk with him and interact with him a little bit as well.

Well, I saw Mies van der Rohe and then I was introduced to Shiro Kuramata’s work and that brought me even further into this world. I’m interested in everything. I mean, Peter Zumthor is obviously very talented, he does interesting work — but I don’t study my contemporaries in architecture and design so much.