"My first encounter with Roni Horn’s work unfolded in a most circumstantial manner. In spring 1989, I had just completed a Southwestern sojourn that had taken me through the Big Country to experience firsthand the land of the Anasazi. This was accompanied by a supplemental itinerary to scout out several seminal earthworks that had been very formative in my development as a designer: Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, and James Turrell’s Roden Crater. During the long-awaited sweep through Donald Judd’s Marfa, Texas, I found myself standing within a cleared-out, weather-strafed former barracks, gazing at a succession of paired copper forms, each forged and machined to duplicate mechanical identity. The immensity of the landscape I had left seemed to converge and compress itself into a world of miniature. What I had encountered, For a Here and a There, from the series "Things That Happen Again," is Roni’s meditation on perception: Exploiting the principle of duplication, it uncovers the concept of unity. In my work as an architect, the reductivist tendency to concentrate experience in the act of "placemaking" — a term used by architects and designers meaning the art of designing an environment that is both attractive and useful to people — has compelled me to discover successive projects by Roni. Her books, photographs, and drawings unveil a prescient language of the real that continues to mine the depths of metaphysical and psychological territories." — Michael Gabellini

You have realized several works in architectural environments before. Specifically I am thinking of Yous in You, in Basel, and Cobbled Leads, in Munich. Both involve embedding cast material into cobblestoned surfaces of a public street or square. Because these pieces are committed to a specific space, do these commissions differ from your installation work and in the process amplify or alter your sense of placemaking?

These pieces function on the level of the vernacular. They are dependent on local circumstance. They integrate more intimately with the site than portable works. Library of Water is in this tradition as well.

In your three-dimensional work, there is a very prescient use of material, from prosaic materials, such as copper, steel, aluminum, lead, rubber, and glass, to a more divergent one, such as gold. Most of these are conceived in their liquid states and are then either forged or cast. What are the specific material qualities that match a given work, and how is a particular material for you a metaphor for intimacy?

Yes, when you talk about originating in the liquid form, I was not specifically aware of this, but it’s interesting. I am not aware of any material metaphor for intimacy. I believe the comment you are referring to was describing the glowing light from between the two gold mats as a result of their closeness.

You have mentioned that "a work always comes together twice: first for the artist and second for the viewer." What do you expect of the viewer and how the experience of viewing unfolds?

I don’t have a list of expectations for the viewer. But a point I have made often in interviews is that the viewer be present. Sounds simple, but in my experience it’s rare for a person to be where they are when they are there.

What happens when you move from one form to another when you are using the same source material? Whether you are conceiving a book, a two-dimensional work, or a three-dimensional work, is the material altered from form to form, and does this affect experiencing the work?

The first work that involved pursuing two different forms with the same material was You Are the Weather, which became Haraldsdóttir as the sixth volume of the work To Place. I originally went after this sixth book, and that is what I was working on when I went to Iceland and spent the summer with my friend Margret [Haraldsdóttir], shooting her portrait while we traveled. As I started to spend time with the material, I realized I had another, different work as well. The content shifted from "face as place" in Haraldsdóttir to "the view voyeurizing the viewer" in You Are the Weather. In general, going in with one set of assumptions is just an entrance. When you get there, it often opens onto a larger world. . . . It happened with Pi, the photographic surround, and with Arctic Circles, the seventh book of To Place, as well as with This Is Me, This Is You, a photographic installation that became a circular book, or a book without end. There are many other examples as well.