Roger Sherman of Roger Sherman Architecture & Urban Design hadn’t been to Berlin for 25 years, until Zócalo’s panel at the Aedes Gallery there. He remembered traveling to East Germany on the subway. “The Stasi would come in between stops on the train,” he said. “You were nervous. You had all the legal work, but you also had a cold sweat.” From the West, near the wall, he recalls seeing “people in the East in their apartment buildings, in their windows hanging up their laundry and looking right at you. It was heart-wrenching, to be that close to somebody and realize that their world was utterly different.” Read more about Sherman below.
Q. What music have you listened to today?
A. “Aux Champs-Élysées,” the cabaret tune. It was playing in one of the stores we were at. It’s the only one I remember making a note of.
Q. What is your favorite word?
A. Paradox.
Q. What is the last thing that inspired you?
A. It sounds cliché to say it was something in Berlin today, but it was actually just seeing these empty spaces in the city that have been reinhabited. There is a lot of talk in the U.S. about recycling, but the recycled urban spaces of Berlin, where sure enough there’s something going on in that vacant lot, are inspiring.
Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A. An architect. It’s boring to say, but it found me.
Q. What is your favorite cocktail?
A. A Manhattan.
Q. What is your greatest extravagance?
A. I travel more than I should.
Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?
A. Morocco.
Q. What is your favorite thing about Los Angeles?
A. Tlapazola. It’s this great Mexican place that not too many people know of in West L.A.
Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?
A. An artist.
Q. What is your most prized material possession?
A. A photograph of me when I was four years old, very carefully laying out a kind of building around myself in nursery school.
Q. Who is the one person living or dead whom you would most like to meet for a drink?
A. Le Corbusier.
To read more about Sherman’s panel on Los Angeles and Berlin, click here.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.