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I was always doing paintings. I actually started painting with oil paints when I was four years old. Not crayons, not pencils and that kid of stuff. I'd paint birds. Anything that moved, stuff like that.

Paul Laffoley

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Paul Laffoley
Age: 80 †
Born: 1935
Born: August 14
Died: 2015
Died: November 16
Architect
Artist
Diarist
Inventor
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Paul George
Jr. Laffoley
Four
Paintings
Actually
Birds
Stuff
Oil
Kids
Paint
Anything
Bird
Crayons
Years
Moved
Crayon
Always
Painting
Paints
Like
Started
Pencils

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I mean, even New York isn't in any great shape anymore in relation to the rest of the world.
Paul Laffoley
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I was born rather late in [my father's] life, in his mid - 40s. And so what he did up until the time he was 15, I think probably from age 12 to 15, my grandfather made him demonstrate mediumistic powers at the Exeter Street Theater, the first Spiritualist church in the United States.
Paul Laffoley
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To have that radical a mind in that bourgeois-looking body was really hard for a lot of people to take, because, when my mother would want to have people over she'd tell [my father], Don't start with the gravity stuff. And then he would invariably do this and the guests would look at each other and say, Well, I think it's time to go now.
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[My father] had this quirky thing of not believing in gravity. And giving me a constant headache about that one. He would say if I showed any interest in gravity, I was becoming a dupe of the system. He could see indications I was beginning to believe in it.
Paul Laffoley
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Both [Nikola] Tesla and [Leon] Theremin were preternaturally young. I mean, for a long time Tesla was a young man well into his 70s. And so was Theremin, even though, at the end, he looked pretty old. But he was still doing things that young guys do, beyond the time you'd normally think people should be doing that stuff.
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Any sort of working drawings are simply diagrams. Architecture encourages your imagination to work that way.
Paul Laffoley
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[My father] was also a lawyer in his bank and specialized in tax law. He would have to do the tax returns for all the Harvard profs because they were buffaloed by that kind of reasoning. Professors in the economics department, even they knew nothing about it.
Paul Laffoley
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I think [H.P. Lovecraft] recognized what he was dealing with, he was dealing with demons. And he was dealing with creatures that're suffering. There's no way out of this suffering.
Paul Laffoley
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The tetrahedron was [ Buckminster Fuller's] big thing. He'd talk about it in the same way Plato talked about angles.
Paul Laffoley
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Boston is not an avant garde place. It stays literally 15 to 20 years behind New York at all times.
Paul Laffoley
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I think [Nikola Tesla] was always like that. And so it was inevitable that he would be an inventor. Because it was so easy for him to think fourth-dimensionally, dynamically. It wasn't just a static thing with him. In other words, it isn't the way an architect thinks, which is essentially static.
Paul Laffoley
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I would be constantly brought up on the carpet by these teachers who were brought up with Abstract Expressionism, saying, You're too uptight, you're not expressing yourself, why don't you feel freer? I said, Well, I don't like that stuff. It means nothing to me.
Paul Laffoley
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At one time in the mid-'70s I became the president of the Boston-Cambridge chapter of the World Future Society. Because I'd been in my studio by myself since 1968 on up. And the thing is that my social life consisted of being involved in organizations like that. I would get people to come and speak, and speak myself and that kind of stuff.
Paul Laffoley
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[Buckminster Fuller] would pretend to be deaf at the right times.
Paul Laffoley
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When I was at Brown. In other words, I'd heard about [H.P. Lovecraft], but I didn't pay that much attention till I happened to go to a meeting about it. And then I got just totally turned on.
Paul Laffoley
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My father said he did have the mathematics of mind physics, or the physics of consciousness.
Paul Laffoley
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I would say that it's probably impossible for a lot of people to even think what H.P. Lovecraft's theological state was.
Paul Laffoley
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[Nikola Tesla] said he had no interest in the spiritual. He didn't believe in telepathy, didn't believe in any of that stuff, didn't believe in any religion, and he just thought all these people were being superstitious and wanted them to go away. And in that way he was very close to H.P. Lovecraft, who was almost a believing atheist.
Paul Laffoley
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When [my father] reached his majority, he was the head of the family. Everybody depended upon him. He went into a very uptight appearance he would wear Chesterfield coats to work, Homburg hats, really getting into the whole thing. He knew people like Oscar Levant. He loved New York. He wanted to live there.
Paul Laffoley
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[My father] was a banker. He was the president of the Cambridge Trust Company, the head of the trust department, and he taught classes at the Harvard Business School. And he was a member of the Harvard Faculty Club, which I am, too, because what I did is... I have the same name as my father, only Jr.
Paul Laffoley