If I start this story, it will take two hours. I'd seen this palace—it was not an Arabic palace. It was done by an Italian in the 17th or 18th century for a sultan. At the end of it was the harem, and at the end of that was a huge bathroom, a room about the size of our living room with a slight divider—one for going to the toilet, where they used a hole in the floor, and the other was for bathing. Have you ever seen Egyptian vases—we have one in the living room—tan colored with little white lines? I thought it was translucent onyx. You could call it a tan marble with little white streaks. The floors and walls of this [room] were all that material. At the ceiling there was a dome made out of the material, and instead of pieces of glass, they used thin sheets of onyx and the light came through that.
To cut it short, this was not onyx. This was alabaster. I didn't know that at the time. The model we made used onyx from Peru... Marble and alabaster are quarried in solid blocks. At the time we started getting serious, the Peruvians promised they could do it, but they couldn't do it after all. We wanted big sheets, eight feet by eight feet, and we wanted a lot of them. You can't find enough boulders. The boulders vary in color and all that. In fact, all the white ones are reserved for the Vatican. We spent two years looking for onyx. ...
The building outside looks kind of cold. I'm really not crazy about the white marble because it's too cold, but we had no choice if we wanted translucency. If I had known that what I was dreaming about was alabaster, and if we could have had proper tests taken to find out if it could stand water, that building would have been a dream. We would have covered the structure with the same thing. These X's would have been covered with a marble. It would be opaque because it would be stuck against it, and it would be all in one material. I doubt if it would stand up to the weather of the United States. If it did, it would be wonderful.
bunshaft on beinecke.
