Click below for an excerpt from the Paul Laffoley interview. http://media.putfile.com/Paul-Laffoley-WTC
Bio on Paul Laffoley
http://www.laffoleyarchive.com/laffoley_writings/bio_laffoley.html
LAFFOLEY ARCHIVE: Paul Laffoley Biographical Info CONDENSED BIOGRAPHY:
Laffoley attended Brown University, graduating in 1962 with honors in Classics, Philosophy, and Art History.
In 1963, he attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and apprenticed with the sculptor Mirko Basaldella before being dismissed from the institution. He was dismissed for "conceptual deviance", after the majority of his designs were given a grade that designates the project not as good or bad, but as 'currently technologically or physically impossible'.
Thereafter, he moved to New York to apprentice with the visionary architect Friedrich Kiesler. He was also hired for the design team of the World Trade Center, but was soon after fired by the chief architect, Minoru Yamasaki, for his unconventional ideas. He had apparently always been quite an 'unconventional' person. By Laffoley's account, he spoke his first word ("Constantinople") at the age of six months, and then lapsed into 4 years of silence, having been diagnosed with slight Autism. Laffoley has written that, in his senior year at Brown, he was given eight electric-shock treatments. As a child he attended the progressive Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont, Massachusetts, where his draftsman's talent was ridiculed by his Abstract Expressionist teachers.