Indiana was fascinated by architecture at an early age, and as a high school student created a number of watercolors of local buildings. This interest in architecture continued to impact his work; in an interview with Donald B. Goodall the artist explained "from the age seven on I was very, very much caught up with architecture. And at one time I had really wanted to be an architect, until it dawned on me that my inability to cope with mathematics and things like that would make it a very difficult career to think about. But I've always been absorbed in architecture. I have a good library of architectural literature. My painting, I think, I approach from an architectural standpoint. My paintings are really built, and they're designed in the way an architect arrives at his buildings. My paintings are arrived at from patterns and (almost what you would call) blueprints much more than [those of] most other artists that I can think of." [1]
[1] Robert L. B. Tobin, William Katz, and Donald B. Goodall, Robert Indiana (Austin: University of Texas, 1977), pp. 26–27.