Nils Roemer: You were born in 1971 and grew up in small places in Wyoming and Montana, removed from the urban bustle that now dominates your life in Los Angeles. Most of your portfolio has been in urban centers, not in rural areas, with the exception of projects like Vals, Switzerland. How much have those earlier impressions had a lasting influence on your work?

Arne Emerson: You know, those places have had a big influence on me, but I didn’t realize it until later in my career. Particularly the landscape around where I grew up. Montana, where I went to college, is called “Big Sky Country” for its wide plains and mountains. The eastern parts of Wyoming, where I was raised, have fewer mountains, but similar beautiful open spaces. Growing up, I remember being fascinated by the contrast of the flat plains with the grain silos. There’s a very strong horizontality in the landscape, with moments of verticality that are strikingly architectural—an empty plain with two or three grain silos, or a barn. In that rural context, they were monumental pieces of architecture and engineering that marked the landscape.

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