4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child) Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.


40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulartory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.


42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That's what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not as a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.


Bruce Mau was born in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada and studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design. In 1985 he established Bruce Mau Design Inc, which has been involved in a wide range of design activities and collaborations with architects Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry, the artist Gordon Monahan, choreographer Meg Stuart, filmmaker Michael Snow as well as the Netherlands Architecture Institute, the Andy Warhol Museum, and the Art Gallery of Toronto. He also serves as design director of Zone Books and editor (with Stanford Kwinter and Johnathan Crary) of Swerve Editions, an imprint of Zone. Mau also has served as Associate Cullinan Professor at the Rice University School of Architecture in Houston, Texas and visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He has recently published a large-scale monograph, Life Style Phaidon, New York, 2000, documenting his design, theory and research.