I met Jim in my second year at OU he had transferred fro Michigan after two years studying architecture we became apartment mates along with Joe Andrash and Lenny Pitkowsky. I was quickly attracted to him as a friend and we spent time together. He put me on to Vermeer who became the focus of so much of my thought and collage painting. He also pointedly commented to me that ideas are not to be equated with architecture. I was always fermenting with ideas about organic theory, sources of architectural inspiration and philosophy. His comment stuck with me. We both thought highly of Elizabeth Mock who BG had hired to teach history. Her course on the Baroque period was inspiring to us both and on a couple of occasions, we dropped by her house to draw her out. She had written "The Architecture of Bridges" and had spent time at Taliesin.

Jim and I stopped at Carlsbad Caverns and Jim was overwhelmed by the scale and interest of the formations. His student work was among the very best of student work at OU and he won the Rome Prize in Architecture, a prestigious grant to study in Rome and travel in Italy. There he met Robert Venturi and they spent time together traveling to Renaissance sites. When I saw Jim’s built work in Tucson I was fascinated by a small interior courtroom he had designed within the court house. The scale, calm, warmth and acoustics had made it into a sought after public venue. I was amazed at how Jim’s low relief paneling and door trim subtly referenced the Italian Renaissance masonry of the Pitti Palace and other buildings of that time and place. It may sound odd but I was completely charmed by the effect. Jim was also outstanding at dealing with budget and commercial expendients to hide ducts and accommodate utilities hidden by rectangular grids carrying cheap acoustic tiles. He had careful and handsome solutions to what Architect; Charles Moore had called “The soft underbelly of American architecture.”