Musings on a Structure for Heaven The architect Alexander Gorlin, 58, has kept files full of arcane references to kabbalistic principles during two decades of designing projects, from public schools and synagogues to palatial Hamptons houses. Although not a terribly devout Jew, he has studied ancient Jewish texts and modern interpretations by scholars including Gershom Scholem and Daniel C. Matt. He has looked for buildings and artworks related to the texts" themes of shattering, repair, voids and heavenly structure. His fifth book, "Kabbalah in Art and Architecture" (Pointed Leaf Press, $60), compares Herzog & de Meuron's steel lacework of the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing to "the radiance of the Bird's Nest" mentioned in the Zohar and Rothko paintings to Exodus descriptions of deep colors bleeding into one other. In his Lower Manhattan office, alongside a pile of books with titles like "Alchemy and Mysticism" and "The Ancient Synagogue," Mr. Gorlin explained how some architects reacted to being called kabbalistic and what he learned from the family astrologer. Q. I have to say I see you as the practical go-getter type, not the mystical type. A. I'm a closet mysticist, what can I tell you? But it was actually on my radar from when I was a child. My mother took my sister and me to this kabbalistic astrologer named Mr. Obloe. I was maybe 13 at the time. She claimed her mother had consulted with him, too. He had some very oddball phrases, like, "Your head is not a hatrack." Then he told me, "You would do well in real estate." I think I misunderstood him. I went into architecture instead. It's worked out. Here I am, what can I say? And then when I was in Hebrew school, my interest was more in the revealed projects of the Old Testament: Noah's Ark and the Temple. My thesis at Cooper Union was actually a reconstruction of Ezekiel's vision of the Temple. I placed that in Union Square, to contrast the sacred and the profane city. Did you get a good grade? It was passing. I think they liked the concept more than the execution. At Cooper Union at the time, anything historical was considered verboten. But I always thought to go further back into the ancient, as a complement to the modern, which I saw in the work of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. And then when I was asked to design a synagogue in Kings Point, in 1995, I did not want to do a pastiche of historicism. For some reason I opened up the books of Gershom Scholem. So many of the concepts seemed to be about architecture, about light, space and geometry. Then I noticed a number of artists, like Barnett Newman and Anselm Kiefer, who were using these themes explicitly, whose work was specifically inspired by them or illustrative of these concepts. Steven Holl told me he had studied Gershom Scholem, too, and Gehry said that he had tried to study the Zohar. So it became anecdotal, I would say. So for years, when you were traveling or at a party, you'd hear a reference to the kabbalah and mentally file it? Because the kabbalah is about revealing the hidden. Your prologue warns about some great rabbis who learned really intensely about this material and had visions of God on a throne, and then went mad or became a heretic or died. I don't think I've ever read an architecture book that started out with "proceed at your peril." Yes, exactly. Just be careful. I was looking around my apartment this morning and thinking, "O.K., those windows are the vessels of light, and my muntins are the symbols of the powers of heaven." Since this is for the Home section, I was thinking, exactly, as you say, many of the concepts in the kabbalah are equally applicable to the home. The home should be a place of light, and light is the giver of form and life. Also there's the whole kabbalistic cycle of birth and renewal, and the shattering of dreams, and the repair of those dreams, and renewal again. And also color, which I find extraordinary. You could write a whole book about color in the kabbalah. It all derives at some level from the description of the Tabernacle. The curtains before the Ark are described in a fantastic array of colors in Exodus: "gold, silver, and bronze, blue-violet, purple and scarlet, fine linen, and goats" hair." It's like an interior design book. How much did the publisher edit you? Suzy Slesin at Pointed Leaf Press was very demanding that it be as comprehensible to the layman as possible, and also that every caption was meaty. There was also an Orthodox Jewish woman, an editor, who went over all my biblical citations. So it's been vetted. When did you find time to work on this? Oddly enough, I wrote a lot of it in the office. I actually find I get my best work done while the swirl of the day is upon me. And I've given talks on this over the years, at the Architectural League and various synagogues around the country, and I've also taught courses on Kahn and Le Corbusier and modern architecture. So in a way it's a summation and culmination of my insights into modern architecture over the last 25 years, of a specific point of view that's not always acknowledged. It's ecumenical, too. I include churches, mosques, synagogues and residential work. There's also the occasional possible anti-Semite, like Frank Lloyd Wright, and Corbusier, too, to some extent. It doesn't discriminate. But a lot of Jews have enjoyed Corbusier's Ronchamp church in France. That's a vessel of light par excellence. I found this amazing quote in the Zohar: "In that firmament are 100 window openings, some on the east and some on the south, and in every single window one star." Those kinds of correspondences, I found astounding, and there were so many of them! Are you devout? What did you do for the recent Jewish holidays? I went to CBST, the gay and lesbian synagogue. It's in the Javits center, in the crystal cathedral. Have you ever been in that space? It has all these interlocking cubes with a space frame that creates diagonals, a bit like the kabbalistic diagrams called sefirot. You're in a cube of light, basically, facing the Hudson.