What makes a loft authentic isn't its layout or its history but its ability to give people a true home - a dwelling that reflects their personalities and aspirations, including their dreams of urbanity.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Loft living is the antithesis of suburban domesticity, if only because the open spaces don't easily accommodate family life. Lofts also offer residents the opportunity - and responsibility - to structure their own space to reflect what's important to them.
Great American art needs the idea of uninterrupted spaces, like a loft, which itself is something very American.
In a modern loft, you can't just fill a space with furniture. Each piece has to be perfect.
It's great to design a beautiful, modern, sleek home like you'd see in a magazine. But if it doesn't suit your lifestyle, it's really wasted.
I'm just fascinated by houses. In another life, I'd have probably trained as an architect. If I had enough money, I'd collect them like other people collect teapots. I don't know why I love them so much. I'm just very interested in the idea of a house as a metaphor for the way one lives.
The buildings that I build very often have a dreamlike reality. I don't mean by that they have a fantasy quality at all, in fact quite the reverse. They contain in some degree the ingredients that give dreams their power... stuff that's very close to us.
Going from sharing a one-bedroom place to living in a loft to two people living in a house to me having my own place by myself has kind of mirrored my career... small steps to bigger, to bigger, to now having a steady job.
You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.
Lofts were never supposed to be homes. They were vacant old factories and warehouses, taken over by artists looking for cheap space and good light.
I used to build lofts in SoHo back when there was nothing there. I had a stoop on West Broadway between Prince and Spring. My partner and I would sit there, eat dinner, and watch the world go by.