Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-96
BALTIMORE: Yes.
LIPPINCOTT: Did you like him
BALTIMORE: Oh, he’s an awful man! Oh, he’s terrible!
LIPPINCOTT: In what way
BALTIMORE: He is egotistical. He is bombastic. He is crude. He’s just the greatest living
sculptor. But he’s not nice, and he was not helpful. He designed something which would take
the whole lawn.
LIPPINCOTT: Was this one of his walls
BALTIMORE: No, it was not a wall. It was a series of levels that came up. He looked at the site;
the site actually falls, so he was going to build these various levels into the contours of the site. It
was an interesting piece. It wasn’t the work he was doing at the moment; it harkened back to
work he had done at Storm King in northern New York State, on the Hudson. He had done this
in Storm King, and it was somewhat related to what he had done at Storm King, but that was
many years before. I was a little surprised by that, but that’s what he wanted to do, and I
couldn’t convince him to do anything else.
LIPPINCOTT: Did you try
BALTIMORE: I did, at various times, try—in particular, when it became clear that the opposition
in the school to it was enormous.
LIPPINCOTT: I remember what I thought was the very funny thing the students did, with the
couch and the lamp— [Laughter]
BALTIMORE: The students were actually pretty good about it, but they were also adamant and
they were prepared to make a lot of trouble.