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Continued.

AR: Can you go from there to how that plays out in physical architectural solutions and their craft?

JC: Well, look at Salem [Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Memorial, 1992]. I worked with the artist Maggy Smith. I looked at it, remembering my father's experience as a Communist when I was a child during the McCarthy era of the 1950s, and I realized persecution has to do with people turning a deaf ear—deafness, silence, and denying memory. The same was true during the witch trials. Maggy and I worked with these words—deafness, silence, and memory—and came up with the design in about an hour and a half. You have the words of the accused on the memorial sliding under the wall in mid-sentence—deafness. When we cut out the back of the memorial and sank part of it into the ground, we put in iron bars through which you look at tombstones of citizens of 1692 who were killed by their neighbors. That was for silence, silent tombstones.

AR: With your populist sensibilities, how do you justify doing houses for extremely wealthy people, in fact Bill Gates, one the richest men in the world?

JC: Look what we got out of Gates. For one thing, we got the world's first heavy-timber-recycling sawmill. Did you know that? Bill wanted the best quality wood in the world and wanted us to look at a nearby forest and see which trees we wanted to cut down. Well, this was at the height of the Spotted Owl crisis here in the Northwest. There was no way I was going to cut down oak. As luck would have it, that very weekend I met this guy, Max Talbert, out of Duluth, who's a salvaged-lumber salesman, and he says, "Jim, I think you should build Gates's house out of salvaged lumber." So my partner, Peter Bohlin, and I got a couple of samples and proposed to Bill that he set up a sawmill for salvaged lumber. Bill created GR Plume & Company and funded it to the tune of a couple million. It was the first heavy-timber-recycling sawmill in the world.

AR: His property included other environmental aspects, didn't it?

JC: If you look at the landscape on Gates's property, you'll see it's the first time anybody ever planted an emergent forest. We went out and with the help of Tom River, the landscape architect, bought about 100 truckloads of forest floor, before they burned it, and spread it over the property. Plus we planted more than 5,000 red elder you can dig out of ditches for free, and we planted an emergent forest. In about 50 years, this forest will have transformed itself from a big-leaf elder forest to a Douglas fir and cedar forest.

Also, the space under the garage is a 100,000-gallon cistern, which we used to buffer the wetlands we created for Gates. Lake Washington's been turned into a desert. All of the wetlands, all the places that foster life, have been embanked and turned into people's front yards. So we talked Bill into creating a wetland. He said, "Wetland. That's the same as a swamp, isn't it? That land cost me $20,000 a front foot." I finally said, "Look, Bill, it's a way for you to connect to the world and stay human. Won't it be wonderful that you'll be able to mark the seasons of your life as salmon return and all kinds of wildlife find this place?" Now the wetland is his favorite thing on the property.

AR: Did the Gates house further your development as a designer?

JC: My understanding of materials took a quantum jump in working with Peter Bohlin. I can show you a direct progression from Grace Episcopal to Gates. Grace was about $150 a square foot; Gates was several times that.

I learned to let materials do all the talking for me. You know, at our very best we're not doing architecture, we're just studying how the components express the physics and biology of a place, and how materials and shapes express the nature of the institution.