Noshir Sheriarji Gowadia is my next door neighbor in Maui. I met him the first time we came down the road we decided to live on, that very same day. We just agreed to the asking price of the previous owner and now we (my wife and I) were looking around our new neighborhood attempting to guess who our now new neighbors may be. We went to the ocean and there was a house that looked like it was still being built, of a wildly original design. My wife wanted to go through it if it was still being built and she just walked up and jiggled the door handle. Two french black french poodles came up to the door barking. A dark haired gentleman appeared suddenly and opened the door and asked my wife Luba, " can I help you."
Reflecting on our visit to Noshir's, we both agreed it was the most incredible houses I had ever been in. The whole structure felt like it was a bubble under the ocean with walls that one feels no closure in. The interior angles were all stealthy, angles unused in architecture previously as far as I could tell. Architects will tell you, feel the house - how does it feel around you. Can you live in it at one with it and yourself. It was six thousand square feet of living area that seemed overwhelming huge yet amazingly intimate for its size.
As I got to know Noshir, he struck me alot like the Einstein, an old friend, Ilse Sternberger told me about when she and her husband went to do his personal portrait back in the early 50's when he was living at Princeton. A quality of being there and very happy in the present, smiling and friendly but another part of him gone off somewhere working. A Nikolai Tesla man who got into trouble the same way Tesla had with J P Morgan, only Noshir got in trouble with the Pentagon.
