The Interruptors

For the past year and a half, two friends and I have been having a two hour lunch together at Wyndemere every Tuesday, missing only a few. The dining room staff places us at a table well away from the hubbub of bridge lunches, noisy committee meetings, arguing golfers … they say it is for our convenience, but maybe not.

The original idea was to recreate the kind of stimulating conversations that we Habitat guys had on the one hour drive out to Immocalee, where we built houses. We informally agree on a specific topic for our next weekly conversation, sometimes with “homework” assignments, and then interrupt each other with better ideas to explore or new observations on life.

At left is Richard McKay, who I have worked with at Habitat for 20 years. He is a Canadian who’s career (after an extended “Hippy Phase”) involved classified work for the Canadian military, running a diesel locomotive factory, operating a string of mines in Hungary, and leasing heavy transport trucks. He even built himself a post-and-beam home on the beach in Nova Scotia.

The other gentleman is Nader Ardalan. He was born in Iran, studied architecture at Harvard and still runs his own architectural design firm that takes on projects all over the world. His focus is on "transcendental architecture.” An example of this type of building is the Pantheon in Rome, the concrete building with the huge “oculus” in the roof. Below is an image from Nader’s homework assignment to us. We all learned a lot about this building and it’s inspirational effect on architects, locomotive manufacturers and spacecraft hardware builders.

My latest homework assignment to the group was “Why does the Webb look nothing like a telescope while the Hubble clearly does?

By the way, the picture at the beginning is not our assigned table. It is in the boardroom of Wyndemere. What a magnificent piece of black walnut.