SUMMARY

The interview traces Mark Foster Gage’s lower-middle-class Navy background, moving across US bases (Nebraska birth, Virginia, California, Indiana), with a Vietnam vet father and working mother who later earned master’s degrees, emphasizing education amid modest means. It highlights his Notre Dame undergrad (postmodern/deconstructivist influences like Graves, Rossi, Eisenman), Yale MArch under Eisenman, Kipnis, Lynn, and Somol, and professional stints with Eisenman/Gehry. It emphasizes founding his firm (2002), Yale teaching/deanship, critiques of parametricism, advocacy for esthetics through philosophers (Harman, Rancière, Chalmers), and recent Saudi projects exploring consciousness, space, and architectural reinvention.