Hans Hollein: First, there is a hill or a depression—that is, a hollow.
Lily Allen: I don’t have any idea what it is. It’s completely the opposite of that, though.
Hollein: That was the essential thing. It was a total fantasy product.
Allen: But then again, if it wasn’t there, I might not be here.
Hollein: That expresses it rather well.
***
Allen: He’s, like, a friend of a friend of mine.
Hollein: Yes. Exactly, I wrote about that too.
Allen: He’s got thirteen children.
Hollein: All he showed me were sculptures.
Allen: He’s such a penis.
***
Hollein: The wall was made of that.
Allen: I got myself this shitty telephone, like an old Nokia that flipped where you can't even have pictures in your messages.
Hollein: That could certainly be seen as an art object.
Allen: That’s what makes a martyr.
***
Hollein: That was in 1958, before I went to America. It was a paradox.
Allen: But there was so much anxiety associated with coming back.
Hollein: It is a little difficult to do that in two or three words.
Allen: Nothing really came of that, though, since my hormones were all over the place.
Hollein: I showed them in a small amphitheater.
Allen: The money doesn’t spread that far.
Hollein: Then it develops into something that perhaps looks more formalized—a cube—and then it grows up, like the Pharos in Alexandria, say, or the tower of Saint Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna.
Allen: (laughs) What are you talking about?
—Raymond Cummings is the author of several books of poetry, including Crucial Sprawl, Seven New Poems, and Assembling the Lord. He blogs infrequently at Voguing to Danzig.