But I enjoyed speaking with him

But I enjoyed speaking with him about his own work and the subtleties with which he was approaching it. In academia it is hard to bank on subtleties. Complexity becomes a cipher for labor and thought (not necessarily talking about complexity of form here, but complexity in the constellation of factors that bear the work). No one would argue that the contributing or governing factors behind architecture are not complex. In fact they are and that is the problem. An enormous barrier that must be surmounted is the orchestration of just those givens, the parsing or triage of contributions into a constructed solution that is so fine tuned and appropriate, has fitness, that you can then sculpt the subtleties like light falling on a surface.