Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-98
LIPPINCOTT: You mean his architectural commissions in this country
BALTIMORE: Yes, well, the office in New York, which Ramos ran, he then split off; and Ramos
was going to run it. So we ended up having a contract with Ramos instead of with Koolhaas,
although Koolhaas said he would continue to be interested and come by and whatever. Then, the
plan for the building, which was fascinating and which I think would have made it one of the
great buildings on campus, had a serious flaw, which was the planned roof of the building.
Again, we had terrible trouble because the cost of building just skyrocketed in the late nineties,
and so all the time we were planning these buildings, the cost of the buildings kept getting higher
and higher and higher, and the amount of money we had didn’t change. So we had to keep
downsizing the buildings in order to make them fit within the financial constraint. That
happened to the Cahill building and that happened to the Annenberg building. They said they
could do that, but they had to put this stuff on the roof, as a roof, and we could not get comfort
that that was going to last and that anybody really understood what that material was. They were
never precise enough about it. So we finally fought and fought and fought with them, and fired
them. This was Jean-Lou, finally, who made that decision. But then we had to get a new
architect. They got a new architect, and they have a building there that’s much more ordinary—
but serves the purpose.
LIPPINCOTT: OK. To get off the buildings—I do want to talk a little bit about your getting the
National Medal of Science from President Clinton in March of 2000. You went to the White
House. Was that fun
BALTIMORE: Oh, yes. That was extraordinary.
LIPPINCOTT: Who else was there Weren’t there other honorees at the time
BALTIMORE: Oh, yes, there’s a whole cadre of them, and I can’t remember who all of them
were; some of them I knew; most of them I didn’t. It was also just at the time when the genome
was going to be announced, so there was a lot of brouhaha about that.
LIPPINCOTT: Was there a connection