Sarah Morris and Weiner at the 2011 Guggenheim International Gala. (Courtesy Getty Images)

Today the BBC offered a nice look at the art scene in Glasgow, Scotland, where a number of great artists have lived and worked over the years, including Douglas Gordon, Richard Wright and Susan Philipsz. (Hans Ulrich Obrist once called it the "Glasgow miracle.")

Why is it such an art powerhouse?

Simon Starling attributes the city's success, in part, to its Transmission gallery, and talk about his experience helping to organize the program there:

"We had this great sense of confidence. That you could just get on the phone to your favourite artist somewhere in the world and invite and often they would come.

"So people like Lawrence Weiner, who was this super important conceptual artist turned up and made a beautiful show and gave a talk and drank whisky with us all.

"Those moments for young artists are so empowering and demystifying.

This sounded a bit familiar, Mr. Weiner drinking whisky. And sure enough, it turns out that it is his favorite drink. Scottish single malt whiskey, he told the 20 x 200 print-editions company.

At a talk in 2008 at Art Basel, he discussed the pornographic film that he made in the 1970s, and offered some advice about how to procure it:

It’s available from the Swiss Institute on a DVD at a [reasonable price]: I figured if three people decided to drink beer instead of Whisky one night when they went out, they could really afford 150 Swiss Francs to go and buy the DVD and they could watch it together.

Sound advice. Take a break from whiskey every once in a while and save some money. Buy an art film. (Or some of the whiskey glasses he designed for the Swiss Institute.)

If you're still following along here and want some more Weiner-whiskey material, there's an intense conversation he had with Karlyn De Jongh and Sarah Gold in January 2010 on a houseboat in Amsterdam that may be of interest. The transcript was turned into a script for a play, and so it notes each time that he smokes or takes a sip of, yes, whiskey.

Here's an excerpt:

I had the same as any other young person growing up in a counter-cultural thing, at times I had to steal something from an object, an idea, something that I never really enjoyed doing. So, I've decided not to do it as much as I possibly can. But it's not any moral value. If you're really hungry, you can steal a loaf of bread. What's the difference? If it gets to be a necessity, the morals go out the door. Somebody is trying to kill you and you have to kill them. I guess you do it.

[Lawrence takes a sip of whiskey.]

Incidentally, it's 5 p.m. in New York, and we're going to go do exactly the same thing right now.

Mr. Duffy outside the future home of a Dia art center on West 22nd Street. (Matt Chaban)

When he was 11, Roger Duffy had his first encounter with art. It was 1966 and he was thumbing through one of those big Time-Life picture books about America at his home in Oakmont, a town on the outskirts of Pittsburgh famous for its golf course of the same name. He came across a picture of a drawing by Diego Rivera hanging in the guest room at Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s wooded retreat 60 miles away. Mr. Duffy asked his father what it was, and Duffy père responded laconically, “It’s art.”

Even today, as one of the most canny combiners of art and architecture, Mr. Duffy, in his reserved way, said he saw no great significance in this awakening. He had come to realize the power of a piece of art, as well as that of its surroundings, even though he did not know it at the time. “I thought of art as magic, and I still do,” he said. “But the two of them together, in that moment, I never really thought of that, now that you mention it. I was just focused on the picture in the picture.”

It would take a few decades for his appreciation of art to develop, and years more for him to incorporate it into his work as a partner at Skidmore Owings & Merrill, but his focus never really wavered. “He may not have known it, but I think this sensitive genius was always there inside him, just waiting to come out,” said Robert Whitman, the renowned multimedia artist and friend and collaborator of Mr. Duffy.

Were it not for Mr. Duffy, there is almost no chance Skidmore, Owings & Merrill would find itself in Chelsea, stitching together a row of old industrial buildings on West 22nd Street into the new Manhattan outpost of the Dia Art Foundation. Easily the most famous skyscraper architects in the world (Lever House, Sears Tower, Burj Khalifa), SOM is not exactly known for its quixotic art projects. But with Mr. Duffy, who has spent the past three decades befriending and subsequently employing nearly every artist to have ever shown at Dia, it is impossible to imagine anyone else undertaking this project.

Slideshow: A Dozen Duffy Designs >>

Mr. Duffy stands out in a firm of more than 1,000 architects, despite his quiet demeanor and monkish aspect. He is just as comfortable talking about phenomenology as he is zoning envelopes and interior finishes, and it is an experiential bent that he labors to incorporate into his work. “He is incredibly zen,” said Dia director Phillipe Vergne. He has an impressive recall of the art shows he has seen, particularly those at Dia, every single one of which he seems to remember.

The first date he and his wife of 23 years ever went on was the 1989 Robert Ryman show at the foundation’s old space at 548 West 22nd Street, which was sold off last decade amid Dia’s money troubles. It is a building Mr. Duffy speaks about with the same reverence most architects save for LeCorbusier’s Ronchamp or Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building.

Akin to the artists he admires, Mr. Duffy has rejected the formalism of his peers and forebearers, an unusual move for someone who works at a firm where the vernacular, varied and considerable as it may be, is still clean glass boxes.

Instead, he invests himself in the mission of his clients, the sites they have selected and, as he puts it, “their aspirations.” He has also developed an unusual way of looking at his projects, in part by using others to help him look at them. “I think these artists in particular spend a lot of time thinking about perception, be it visual perception or aural perception or other things, and they were delving into the fact that most of our thinking is done by the unconscious side of our brains,” he said. “They can bring something to the work that no one else can.”

David Childs, SOM’s long-time director, said he has rarely seen such a commitment to collaboration.

“A lot of architects draw a line around what they do, and maybe everyone else can hang some art on the wall, or a light fixture,” Mr. Childs said. “Roger has always been interested in bringing in groups of people with different perspectives than he has, different ways of thinking, and really letting them help drive the design process.”

An early conceptual design for the future Dia, joining two existing buildings with a new one in between. (Dia)

Growing up in Oakmont, Mr. Duffy said his was an intelligent home, if not an intellectual one—Time-Life territory. His father sold vinyl siding “in the coal towns of Western P.A.,” though he eventually became mayor and a state assemblyman. His mother was a court minute clerk at the county courthouse, “the person who swears you in before you testify.”

His first real brush with architecture came during his senior year in high school, when he would go to retrieve his sister each weekend from Carnegie Mellon University, where she was in her freshman year. Two women across the hall would let Mr. Duffy wait in their room from time to time. “They were both architecture students, and they were always sketching, which looked like fun, so I figured why not,” he said of his decision to study the subject when he started at CMU the following year.

When he graduated in 1979, the country was in recession, but Pittsburgh was especially bad off following the collapse of the steel industry. “There was absolutely no work, so I headed toward the nearest town, which was Washington,” Mr. Duffy said. He had read about SOM’s work and was impressed enough that it was the only place he applied. After a week of showing up at Mr. Childs’ door, Mr. Duffy’s eventual mentor relented and found him a job as a junior designer. He recalls being struck by Mr. Duffy’s desire to train first in the technical department.

When Mr. Childs moved to New York in 1985 to run the firm, he brought Mr. Duffy and a handful of other architects with him. It was there that Mr. Duffy had his artistic epiphany, on that date with his wife. Until then, he had not given art much thought, but he remembers being dumbstruck by
Ryman’s work, as well as the little things, like Dan Flavin’s transformation of the stairwell with a fluorescent light piece from 1966. “It was so special, and really made me realize the potential of space,” he said. “I wanted to do something like that with my work.”

It wasn’t until he was named a partner, in 1997, that he began to experiment with incorporating artists into his creative process. “I had a responsibility to do something special,” he said. “And why the hell not?”

Mr. Duffy's Greenwich Academy, designed with James Turrell. (SOM)

In seeking to expand his palette beyond the typical boundaries of architecture, Mr. Duffy has often collaborated with the minimalist artists he has gotten to know—even using commissions as an excuse to get closer to his idols. His first realized project as a principal was a lobby renovation at 350 Madison Avenue, completed in 2002. He tried to convince the late artist Fred Sandback, who drew in space using lengths of colored yarn, to work with him. Ultimately, Sandback, who died in 2003, turned the project down.

Not all artists feared being involved in commercial work, but not all of Mr. Duffy’s projects were so commercial, either. Next came a long-running partnership with James Turrell, famous for his sky-spaces, on a trio of private schools. The first, only now being built, was in Kuwait. Then came a new upper school for Greenwich Academy in Greenwich, Conn., completed in 2004. The pair created a long glass structure, with a greenroof on top, set into the hillside of the bucolic campus. Mr. Turrell crafted a dramatic entrance of prismatic lights.

Three years after that was an even more ambitious project: a new science building for the Deerfield Academy, in Deerfield, Mass. Mr. Duffy sought out astronomers, geologists and other scientists to join Mr. Turrell, the artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Dia’s former director Michael Govan in helping him conceive the design. What they came up with was a series of curving, curling brick walls. Inside, different installations track the movement of the sun and the strata of the earth beneath the school.

These days, Mr. Duffy is finishing a collaboration with conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner for an art and design-focused high school on East 57th Street that is set to open in the fall. Another one is being planned in Elizabeth, N.J., and he is working with a number of artists on a new building for the New School at the corner of 14th Street and Fifth Avenue.

“What good is just sticking a picture on the wall at the end?” Mr. Duffy said of his intense commitment to artistic collaboration.

He has designed his share of conventional projects, among them a cafeteria for Condé Nast (no, not that Condé cafeteria, but another at 750 Third Avenue for the Fairchild division), the Skyscraper Museum in a Battery Park City storefront and the Toren condo tower in Downtown Brooklyn. Still, all involve unusual collaborations, if not with artists. A fashion designer is helping with a new airport terminal in Mumbai.

It was through his work with the Dia artists that Mr. Duffy first got involved with the foundation. Michael Govan knew him from the shows he frequented, but it was after some difficulties in finishing the foundation’s building in Beacon, in 2003, that one of the artists suggested SOM, and specifically Mr. Duffy, could help. Another friendship was born.

Mr. Vergne recalled interviewing upwards of a hundred architects for the job, but in conversations, people kept telling him to seek out Mr. Duffy. “When I met Roger, he took me completely off guard,” Mr. Vergne said. “He gave me none of the answers I was used to from architects.”

The artists are equally excited. “In the words of a friend of mine, when they heard about Roger getting the job, they said, ‘Thank god they didn’t pick a starchitect,” Mr. Whitman said. “I call them ego-architects. All they do is get in the way. But not Roger. All he cares about is the art.”

Slideshow: A Dozen Duffy Designs >>

mchaban@observer.com | @MC_NYC

At Dia’s annual benefit lunch up in Beacon, N.Y., Mr. Weiner took the stage to speak about his late friend, the car-parts sculptor John Chamberlain, who was being honored. “Art is made because you aren’t satisfied with the configuration of things in front of you, so you try out a different configuration.” Eloquence is rare at museum benefits!

A few days later, Mr. Brant, who has helped the Whitney with key acquisitions, accepted one of three of the museum’s annual American Art awards during a dinner in the Terminal Warehouse in Chelsea. He looked characteristically suave, but was unexpectedly soft-spoken and humble, and he said the award filled him with “great emotion that I can’t express.” He thanked his mother and father for showing him that “the world had more things to offer than war and sports,” he thanked his friends, and then he thanked his wife, supermodel Stephanie Seymour, for reminding him “art and beauty are a form of everything we do.” Finally, in a curiously earnest moment one doesn’t often see at these things, he told her, and the whole room, that he loved her.

Lawrence Weiner, 'NO TREE NO BRANCH,' 2011/12. (Photo by Bradford Robotham/The Jewish Museum)

The Jewish Museum just sent over this little Friday delight, a new work by Lawrence Weiner that will hang in the entrance lobby of the museum through May 13. It's called NO TREE NO BRANCH (2011/12), and is based, according to the news release, on the Yiddish saying: "All the stars in the sky have the same face." Mr. Weiner spelled it out in Arabic, English and Hebrew, and broke it into pieces. Here's an explanation from the release:

"[T]he three languages... transform an originally isolationist "them/us" adage into an inclusive, non-hierarchical statement outlining one of the foremost precepts of peace. The sayings are arranged to break a circle, along with the words, NO TREE and NO BRANCH. Another text, in the center of the broken circle, reads AN OLIVE TREE IS AN OLIVE TREE FOR ALL THAT. These simple statement/icons can be seen as plain unambiguous shapes. Yet, arranged together, they also bear deep symbolic meaning - the olive branch of peace, the tree of life, and the representation of movement with curvilinear lines to express simultaneity.

It's always a nice surprise to see Mr. Weiner's text in a new language. He's worked in quite a few tongues at this point! Here is a piece in Icelandic (our favorite), one in French, one in Spanish, two more in Arabic and one in Mandarin Chinese.

Courtesy Word Above the Street

The Art Newspaper reports that nonprofit organization Word Above the Street has signed up a bevy of artists for a 12-week project to transform 300 of New York's water towers into public artworks. Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Weiner, Marilyn Minter, E.V. Day, Tony Conrad, Andy Goldsworthy and Tony Oursler, as well as rapper Jay-Z are just some of the artists on board with the aptly named Water Tank Project, an effort to increase public awareness of the need to conserve water.

Word Above the Street is helmed by filmmaker Mary Jordan and supported by a team of curators that includes some art world bigwigs, like Lisa Dennison, the chairman of Sotheby’s North and South America; Neville Wakefield, the senior curatorial adviser for MoMA PS1; Alison Gingeras, the head curator of François Pinault’s collection; and Toby Devan Lewis, a trustee of the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Though the full roster of artists is quite impressive, the project is not only open to established artists. The website has posted an open call to "all artists regardless of age, experience, sex, race, color, or national origin" and plans a school competition so some young artists will get the chance to express themselves across New York City's skyline.

Here's hoping Rachel Whiteread, a pioneer in water tower art, gets a crack at the project.

Update, Feb. 25: According to a representative at the Water Tower Project, at this time Radiohead singer Thom Yorke is not a part of the project, as was originally stated in this post.

The Artists Documentation Program website.

The Artists Documentation Program, a branch of the Menil Collection, has opened the doors on its impressive collection of artist interviews and placed the whole archive online. Previously only available to curators and art historians, the online project was funded in association with the Whitney and the Harvard Art Museums’ Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art.

It's an excellent time-suck for anyone looking for a distraction over the weekend, a bit like when The Paris Review put their entire interview collection online, though these are video interviews and often you can see the works being discussed. Standouts of the 33 interviews, which were all conducted in the past 30 years, include Jasper Johns, Brice Marden and Lawrence Weiner.

Here's how the interview with the recently deceased Cy Twombly ends:

Cy Twombly [caught up in the conversation]: Yeah, I—oh, look at how much time we’ve killed!

[ADP Associate Director] Carol Mancusi-Ungaro: In the preservation of art, we killed time. I like that. (laughs)

Take a look over here.