Evans Woollen: Tracing the Forgotten History of the “Dean of Indiana Architects”

In 1967, a reporter on assignment for the New York Times Magazine boarded a flight to Indianapolis, Indiana. He was unenthusiastic about his destination—what little he knew of the Hoosier capital, and the people who lived there, was tinged with a deep-seated cynicism. “I tend to refer to Hoosiers as Them, even as I admonish myself for such a baseless, nonexistent generality, for I developed an intense dislike for their rigid, conformist mores, their humorless provincialisms,” he would later write in a tone so obviously condescending that one can hardly imagine it being published today.¹ “And now, inside the airport, I am struck by the uniformity of clothing styles.”

The purpose of this reporting trip was a large theater named Clowes Memorial Hall, recently completed on the campus of Butler University. Why this building was newsworthy depended on where you lived—and, therefore, who you were. For Indianapolis residents, Clowes (pronounced “clues”) was a major addition to their city, an unprecedented piece of cultural infrastructure that promised to put the Hoosier capital on the map. Boasting 2,200 seats and state-of-the-art technical infrastructure, the theater was the first venue in the city large enough to accommodate national touring productions, meaning locals would no longer have to drive to Chicago or St. Louis to see Broadway-quality productions. An artistic committee that included George Balanchine, Helen Hayes, Agnes DeMille, and Arthur Rubenstein was advising on the hall’s programming. “Showcasing noted talents only” promised superlative-laden advertisements.

But for the Times’s national readership, Clowes was intriguing for perhaps another reason. Here was a major new cultural institution of the highest caliber, located not in a cosmopolitan metropolis like New York, Boston, or Los Angeles…but in Indianapolis, a “flyover” city better known for cornfields and car races than great performing arts. The hall’s ultramodern design was also surprising: a nine-story edifice of sheer Indiana limestone slabs held together by an exposed concrete superstructure, a sort of neo-cathedral rising from the horizon line. Seemingly solid and porous at the same time, its façade recalled the cubist assemblages of abstract art. Indianapolis had a reputation for strip malls, not architectural marvels, but Clowes seemed intent to prove those stereotypes wrong. “I don’t know what those imported operas and ballets have brought to the Hoosiers, but whoever created this building has brought them more than enough,” the Times reporter later wrote.

Indianapolis had arrived. So had Clowes’s architect, Evans Woollen.

If you are not familiar with Evans Woollen, we won’t blame you. Despite growing up in Indianapolis where Woollen did most of his work, his name and biography were completely unknown to us. But we knew his buildings. Spend any time in the nation’s sixteenth largest city and you are likely to stumble on a Woollen-designed library, church, school, theater, office, or house, all hiding in plain sight. In the modern era few architects were as prolific here; even fewer in such ubiquitous fashion. “If there is one man mostly responsible for what Indianapolis looks like today,’ wrote the Indianapolis Star upon Woollen’s death in 2016, “it would be the architect Evans Woollen.”²

Despite Woollen’s outsized significance to our city, surprisingly little has been written about him, and almost no critical attention has been paid to the ideas that informed his practice. For the past five years we have researched the full breadth of Woollen’s life and work, piecing together a six-decade career of architectural invention uniquely shaped by the contours of place, people, and identity. An Indianapolis native, Woollen designed some of his hometown’s most iconic—and iconoclastic—works of modern architecture, and it is here where his legacy is most acutely felt. His emergence coincided with the city’s own postwar rise, a period of unprecedented urban regeneration that thrust this once-sleepy frontier capital into the modern era. In this time of immense change, some loved Woollen’s emphatic, proudly modern buildings, while others found them challenging, severe, even ugly. His most visible projects—large Brutalists works of a civic nature—have been the subject of particular consternation over the years. “The most accomplished, controversial and avant garde architect in Indianapolis is not the most popular man in town,” wrote the Indianapolis Star Magazine in 1976, at what was then the height of Woollen’s career.

For these reasons and more, Woollen’s relationship to Indianapolis—and Indianapolis’s relationship to Woollen—was always nuanced, if not strained. However, we believe that Woollen should be remembered for more than just the controversy his buildings attracted. Our research also uncovered a multi-decade practice of empathetic, human-centered architecture conducted long before such notions were part of the field’s mainstream. Looking past the heavy-handed bravura of his more polarizing work, we find a humanist architect preternaturally dedicated to architecture’s larger function within its physical and social contexts. “A building is what it does,” Woollen wrote in 1985, a sort of six-word manifesto that he would reiterate in the latter years of his career.³ It was a reminder of what he saw to be architecture’s true purpose: to enhance the lives of people through the places they inhabit. This, we believe, is Woollen’s true legacy.

To understand Woollen, it is necessary to start at the beginning. Evans Woollen III was born in 1926 in Indianapolis to an affluent family with deep local ties. His forefathers were bankers, lawyers, and politicians, well known in town for their business acumen and leadership in civic affairs. Woollen, however, would follow a different path: “It sounds flippant, but I knew I wanted to be an architect when I was playing in the sand pile,” he once said.⁴

He would pursue this passion at Yale University (his father’s and grandfather’s alma mater), ultimately graduating with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture. His time at Yale coincided with a period of significant transition: the tenets of European modernism were just beginning to percolate through the school’s pedagogy, and Woollen embraced them enthusiastically—at least initially. His thesis jury was a star-studded collection of modernist evangelists: Philip Johnson, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Louis Kahn, who served as his thesis advisor. But Woollen was also taken by the architectural history classes taught by historian Vincent Scully, whom he later called “the single strongest influence on me… although I would not have recognized it at the time.”⁵ Although Woollen would initially practice as an unabashed modernist, the dialectic of past and present, tradition and modernity would come to be a key tension in his work. At some point during his studies Woollen also benefited from the mentorship of Paul Schweikher, completing a summer internship in Schweikher’s studio outside Chicago.

After graduation, Woollen moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, where he had been offered an apprenticeship in Johnson’s studio. For a fledgling architect there could have hardly been a more exciting place to be. In the 1950s New Canaan was a hotbed of modernism, and Johnson, soon to be awarded the Seagram Building commission, was one of its foremost American practitioners. Woollen made the most of it, living in a converted barn for $50 a month and designing modest, International Style houses for personal clients on the side. At least one of these, a home for the Eugene J. Naill family, came his way through a budding friendship with the architect John Johansen, also based in New Canaan (and along with Johnson, a member of the so-called Harvard Five architects).

But after three years living and working in New Canaan, Woollen made the pivotal decision to relocate his practice—and his life—away from the East Coast. He would return back to Indianapolis. In retrospect, the choice may appear surprising. At the time, New Canaan was a nexus of American modern architecture, and Woollen was at the center of it—building buildings and rubbing shoulders with some of the most visionary practitioners of his day. A promising career at the very pinnacle of the profession seemed to stretch out before him. For a young and ambitious architect operating within an elite environment of design innovation, what did Indianapolis have to offer him?

Woollen would give multiple explanations for the move over the years, ranging from familial commitments to a larger, more altruistic desire to give something back to his ancestral home. His ancestors had lived in Indianapolis for generations, modeling a distinctly midwestern form of civic leadership and community boosterism that Woollen could emulate. While previous Woollen men may have sought to improve their city through business or philanthropy, Woollen could make a difference—and therefore live up to the family name—in his own way: through architecture. “I felt an obligation to help out,” he explained to the Indianapolis News.⁶ “Indianapolis needs to keep a few sons at home—those with an appreciation of our historical past and an understanding of our yearnings for the future.” He then went on to declare just how fundamental the city was to his identity: “[Frank Lloyd] Wright was of the prairie and Eero Saarinen was of Detroit and the world of the auto. Indianapolis is my place.”

Woollen officially established his firm in Indianapolis in the summer of 1955. He was 28. Three years out of architecture school, his rented office on Monument Circle was no larger than a “broom closet,” as he described it later, “with just room for my drawing board and my own chair and a seat for a missing client.”⁷ From these inauspicious beginnings Woollen Associates would grow to become arguably the leading architectural practice in the city. It was at least the most exciting, regarded for its daring (and frequently divisive) designs. Throughout the next half century the firm worked on an astoundingly wide array of typologies: homes, office buildings, apartment complexes, schools, libraries, churches, theaters, museums, community centers, master plans, even a monastery. Many of these commissions were in and around central Indiana, a remarkable concentration of built work by a single architect.

The firm’s first completed project in Indianapolis followed a template Woollen had already used in New Canaan: an International Style glass box with a flat roof and slab walls. Designed for the Eli Lilly and Company chemist Thomas V. Parke, the exceedingly minimalist residence with floor-to-ceiling glass windows looked like no other home in Indianapolis. In 1957 Architectural Record named it a “Record” house—a publicity coup for Woollen and his nascent practice. “With great restraint and economy of means, Evans Woollen has constructed a budget house particularly well adapted to entertaining, and noteworthy for its deceptive aura of size and importance,” wrote the magazine, dubbing the Parke House’s open floor plan “the big room concept.”⁸

More homes (and big room concepts) would follow. In each, one could feel Woollen grasping for his own personal vernacular, his own solution to problems of program, form, and style. A 72-bed sorority house on the campus of Depauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, was an obvious Mies van der Rohe-redux, a clear-cut copy of the Bauhaus architect’s recent work at the Illinois Institute of Technology. But another house, the Jordan and Joan Liebman House, was far more unorthodox, comprised of two cylindrical volumes with “top hat” shake roofs (Woollen claimed to be inspired by the famous trulli huts of Alberobello, Italy, which he had seen on a postgraduate tour). A third home, the Donald M. Mattison House, was a singular amalgamation of New Formalist and Palladian elements crossed with a dash of French Second Empire. All of these projects were completed in the same five-year period.

Then came Brutalism.

In 1959 Woollen was invited to propose for the Clowes Memorial Hall commission via Allen Whitehill Clowes, a family friend and the son of the hall’s primary benefactor, Edith Whitehill Hinkel Clowes. Although sited on the campus of Butler University, the hall was expressly intended by Edith Clowes to be a gift to the entire city, offering an exciting vision for Indianapolis’s future and, at the same time, a compelling rebuttal to the negative stereotypes that had defined its past. The brief was ambitious, and with limited professional experience himself, Woollen knew he had only a narrow chance of winning the commission on his own.

Thinking entrepreneurially, he decided to team up with his old friend from New Canaan, John Johansen. Ten years his senior and nationally recognized, Johansen’s brought an alluring out-of-town prestige to their joint proposal that was not only helpful, but essential—Woollen would later speculate that without the more famous architect’s involvement, he would have likely lost the commission. “There is still a certain schizophrenia here that makes the Midwesterner overrate things from the outside world,” Woollen would tell the New York Times Magazine.⁹ The plan worked. Woollen and Johansen won the job, even beating out Eero Saarinen, who Edith Clowes and the selection committee were also considering.

Nonetheless, Woollen would come to call this regionalist sentiment the “pioneer attitude”—a nagging, ingrained propensity of his fellow Hoosiers to look outside the state for architects rather than appreciate what they had in their own backyard. “The ethos, or characteristic spirit, of this city is made up by too many people who would rather be somewhere else. They engender an inferiority complex hard to overcome by those who would love this place,” he griped to an interviewer plainly around this same time.¹⁰ The “pioneer sentiment” was on full display in nearby Columbus, Indiana, where J. Irwin Miller and the Cummins Foundation Architecture Program were sparking something of an architectural revolution by importing blue-chip architects from out of state to do work in the town. A hometown hero with big ambition, Woollen would wrestle between the twin poles of local acceptance and national acclaim throughout his entire career.

When Clowes opened in the fall of 1963 it was met with near universal praise—at least on the national stage. Architectural Forum put the project on its December 1963 cover, while Fortune named it one of “ten buildings that point the future.”¹¹ Locally, however, the reception was more mixed. “Clowes Hall Concrete Shocks and Fascinates,” proclaimed the Indianapolis Star, citing locals’ curiosity (and skepticism) about an industrial material like concrete being used for a luxury theater.¹² Woollen told the Times that “a few city fathers wanted to tear up the seating and install a central aisle, and another group of conservatives wanted to paint the concrete exterior gold. It seemed pretty rough to them at first. But now they accept it.”¹³ Unfortunately, Clowes’s design has been changed in other ways over the years. A 2012 renovation punched a large glass window into the hall’s front façade, irreparably altering the design’s material and formal character. Interior finishes, all handpicked by Woollen, have also been changed significantly.

Clowes proved to be transformative for Woollen’s career, ushering in a series of larger and more significant commissions that would buoy the firm’s business over the next decades while also testing the aesthetic preferences of Indianapolis as a whole. Project by project, Woollen worked to champion a stronger, more ambitious architectural identity for his hometown that had ever been imagined before. Although by no means the only modern architect active in Indianapolis during this time, his Ivy League pedigree and flair for boundary-pushing design put him in a class of his own. (This was also likely part of the calculus that went into his decision to return home from New Canaan: in Indianapolis he could be a proverbial big fish in a small, midwestern pond.) “He was a one-man marketing and design visionary,” observed architect Deborah A. Burkhart, who worked for the firm in the 1980s before becoming a principal at Ross Barney Architects in Chicago.¹⁴ “All the other partners [in Woollen’s firm] were there to support him. He was the starchitect of Indianapolis, maybe the state,” she said.

For national observers Woollen was a bold and dynamic architect, but something of a novelty—a Philip Johnson-acolyte making his way “out there” in the midwestern hinterlands. His work always reflected the larger architectural trends unfolding outside the state, and was frequently covered in prestigious publications like Architectural Record and Architectural Forum. But those in Indianapolis held a different, more ambivalent view. For starters, Indianapolis was not a city terribly interested in architecture. Once distinguished by its resplendent Victorian streetscapes, by Woollen’s time this architectural identity was being bulldozed away in the name of urban renewal, replaced by a bland form of corporate modernism that did little to define a distinctive urban identity for the city. “The atmosphere was not about design. It was about economics,” one former city planning department official told us. Unlike in Columbus, Indianapolis’s business and political elite lacked a design-minded leader like J. Irwin Miller to lead the charge.

Woollen helped to fill this void—but it also made him a lightning rod for controversy. His buildings stood out, their bombastic use of shape, material, and color not always welcomed by a generally conservative populace. His forthright personality also ruffled feathers, and anyone who met Woollen was made abundantly aware that the architect hailed from a rarified social class. Dressing and talking like an East Coast aesthete, accusations of elitism—a cardinal sin for meritocratic, salt-of-the-earth Hoosiers—dogged him for most of his career. Yet even if they disagreed with his methods, few could argue with his unabashed passion for both architecture and his hometown. As one anonymous local philanthropist told the Indianapolis Star Magazine, “He’s the most stubborn s.o.b. I’ve ever known. But he’s a magnificent citizen.”¹⁵

Barton Tower, completed in the late 1960s, exemplified many of these tensions. Sited on a small triangular lot in the heart of downtown Indianapolis, this government-funded public housing complex was originally conceived to help alleviate the city’s growing housing deficit and provide dignified, well-designed shelter to low-income seniors. Distilling Le Corbusier’s béton brut on a shoestring budget, Woollen saw Barton as an innovation in mass housing in line with other experiments of the era, such as Archigrams’s Plug-in City or Moshie Safdie’s Habitat 67. He also used the project to make the case for inner city density at a time when some local leaders were favoring suburbanization and downtown disinvestment. “Give us density where we so desperately need it; save our low density where it best thrives at a distance from the heart. Let us have planning by consensus not by greed,” Woollen was quoted at the time, channeling the pro-urbanist philosophy of Jane Jacobs.¹⁶ He would continue to serve as an ardent advocate for downtown Indianapolis’s revitalization over the years.

However admirable these aspirations were, Barton’s appearance did not strike everyone as the type of design that Indianapolis needed. “The Barton Apartments might be significant for its period to some people, but other people find it atrocious, ugly. I don’t know that I have to agree with those who like it just because it appeared in a magazine article,” said one housing official later.¹⁷ After some initial success, the building (like so many public housing complexes of the era) sank into obsolescence. In 1995 one of the complex’s key features, a four-story bridge that connected the main tower to a shorter annex building across the street, was demolished by the city to great fanfare—the mayor himself swung the wrecking ball. Today the tower is completely encircled by new low-rise construction, its relationship to the neighborhood materially compromised. It stands as a lonely sentinel, a relic of a bygone era.

Even more controversial was the Minton-Capehart Federal Building, a monolithic concrete office block located just a few blocks from Barton’s site. Completed in 1974 but designed more or less contemporaneously with Barton, the building overlooked a large public plaza along one of downtown Indianapolis’s main thoroughfares, making it an unmissable billboard for Woollen’s design approach. “This is the building that so many people love to hate,” said Woollen, not inaccurately; its reverse-ziggurat form has been likened over the years to everything from a fortress and a bunker to a pigeon coop and an IBM punch card.¹⁸ More recently the building has come under fire from the Trump administration, appearing on a March 2025 list of federally owned buildings earmarked for sale (the list was subsequently taken down, and as of writing no formal announcement about the building’s fate has been made).

If the Federal Building is the most criticized project in Woollen’s oeuvre, it is also the most misunderstood. “It’s not meant to be a pretty building,” the architect later said. He explained the building’s blocky horizontality as a very intentional spatial strategy for creating uninterrupted street frontage and a greater sense of street-level containment for the pedestrian.¹⁹ A conventional tower-in-the-park design would have left voids on either side of the building. Woollen did the opposite, opting instead for a long and low bulwark running along the plaza’s edge. It was this type of foresighted philosophy that Woollen applied to much of his urban design work: define the space, create containment, leave the city better than when you found it.

The Federal Building also demonstrated another important strain of Woollen’s practice: graphics and murals. “You can feel intimidated by a building or loosen up because the building is telling you to,” he said of these interventions, and many of his projects during this period, such as a community center on Indianapolis's westside and a large opera hall on the campus of Indiana University, included colorful supergraphics in the vein of Barbara Stauffacher Solomon.²⁰ The Federal Building upped the ante, featuring a 672-foot contiguous mural by the celebrated graphic designer Milton Glaser. Entitled Color Fuses, the polychromatic design was conceived by Glaser and Woollen as a counterbalance to the architecture’s more somber heft. Some hated the mural even more than the building it emblazoned, comparing the design to “a firetruck that took a corner too fast” and “a ribbon around Arnold Schwarzenegger’s neck.”²¹ Last restored in 2012, Color Fuses is today considerably sun-faded and hardly captures the chromatic vibrancy that its creators intended.

The Federal Building would be Woollen’s last truly Brutalist work; by the late 1970s his practice began drifting into noticeably different territory. If previously he had aspired to be the Frank Lloyd Wright of Indianapolis—to create architecture that would make unforgettable statements on behalf of both himself and his city—his goals were now becoming much more subdued. No longer interested in the monumental, attention-seeking buildings for which he had earned his reputation, he began to favor an architecture that was far quieter and unafraid of history or precedent. Futuristic glass boxes were jettisoned for familiar vernacular elements like pitched roofs and dormers. Cold concrete gave way to warmer plaster and wood. “People don’t like having statements made to them. They’d rather be whispered to,” he said.²²

It’s unclear to what extent the criticism of his earlier buildings affected this shift. The field’s larger drift towards postmodernism certainly played a role, and Woollen was known to admire the work of postmodernists like Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, and Stanley Tigerman. Yet in a career that had already flitted from one design trend to the next, this change could not be written off as only skin-deep. He called his new philosophy “situational architecture,” a means of thinking about practice that was outside in rather than inside out; that saw the architect as an orchestrator of stakeholders rather than an arbiter of taste; and that considered finished buildings merely as suspended moments in an ongoing continuum of change.

Importantly, it also made context—spatial, cultural, social, historical—a primary concern. “I personally never thought of the work as postmodern,” remembered architect Kalevi Huotilainen, a leader in the firm during this period.²³ “It was about community. It was about something that builds on what many people have worked on before, and will continue to work on after. In my mind, Evans had two eras: his modernist era and his contextual era. I was very proud to be a part of the second era.”

No project embodied this contextualist approach better than the New Harmony Inn. Completed in 1975 in the historic southern Indiana town of New Harmony, the inn sensitively reflected its bucolic, nineteenth-century surroundings in form, material, and tone. “We collaborate with the past and the present; we thrive on the continuing argument and opposition about us,” Woollen told Architectural Record while he was working out the inn’s initial design.²⁴ Instead of raw concrete and colorful supergraphics, the program consisted of demure brick structures, gabled and connected by gravel paths. Woollen wove a contemporary sensibility directly into the massing of the building’s elemental forms, creating a crisp but patently inoffensive mosaic of planar geometries, old and new. Glimpsed among the clapboard houses and picket fences lining New Harmony’s quaint downtown, today the inn barely registers as “modern” architecture at all.

Participatory design also became an important element in Woollen’s work during this time. Beginning in the early 1970s, these practices, which included interactive workshops and sometimes contentious community charrettes, proved essential to applying Woollen’s “situational” approach to more complex, stakeholder-laden commissions. “The rule I make is that everyone is a collaborator,” he said, and he meant it.²⁵ Working on a new masterplan for the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati, Woollen opened up a storefront office and engaged neighborhood residents on their own turf. Tasked with designing living quarters for a Benedictine monastery in southern Indiana, he moved in with his monastic clients for two weeks to observe their daily rituals firsthand. Once, during a planning workshop for a new library on the campus of St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana, Woollen and the other adults in the room were struggling to choose the building’s best location on campus. Then a lone freshman stepped up to the map that the group was looking at and offered an unlikely solution. “She finally picked up the symbol of the library and put it on a place and everybody drew in their breath because they knew it was the right one, and that’s where it was built,” remembered Woollen.²⁶

To Woollen, these tactics were a corrective to the “many decades in the past of architects beating their breasts about their artistic insights and prowess.”²⁷ Nonetheless, Woollen still found a role for architectural audacity when the project demanded it. Such was the case for Central Library, the architect’s last major commission and one of the largest of his entire career.

Consisting of a 237,000-square-foot addition to the main branch building of the Indianapolis Public Library, the design is not widely known outside of Indianapolis. It was not covered in the national architectural press and, because of the legal fracas surrounding its completion, was not submitted for architectural awards that would have brought it more visibility.

In 2004, with construction well underway, cracks the size of footballs were discovered in the building’s concrete foundations. Work ground to a halt. While the actual culpability of Woollen’s firm for what appeared to be a construction failure remains a matter of debate, the firm was fired and sued for negligence. The parties settled out of court in 2006. Two years behind schedule and some $50 million over budget, the project finally opened in late 2007.

For Woollen, the saga represented a painful asterisk on what all believed would have been—should have been—a triumphant capstone to his entire career. Compared to other large public libraries completed around this same time such as OMA’s Seattle Central Library and Pei Cobb Freed’s San Francisco Main Public Library, Central Library in Indianapolis is a design of restrained simplicity, and by an architect with little to prove. It was Woollen’s swan song to his city.

The addition’s primary element was a minimalist glass-and-steel tower, wide and gently parabolic, which gently cupped a 1917 Paul Philippe Cret-designed structure—arguably the city’s most important example of pre-modern architecture that had not yet been torn down—in an empathetic embrace. There was clear differentiation between what was old architecture and what was new: “To be a contextualist in this situation would mean you can’t blow Cret up, literally, to this type of scale. You have to stand back and be so respectful that you’re not imitating Cret,” Woollen explained.²⁸ The tower connected to the Cret building via a dramatic seven-thousand-square-foot glass atrium with slender steel columns that arched majestically from floor to ceiling, casting languid shadows in their wake. Resplendent and infinitely programmable, this was the “big room concept” at a civic scale. It is today one of Indianapolis’s most beloved community spaces.

What is the meaning of Woollen’s architecture today? This is a question we’ve grappled with for some time. To be sure, there is an urgent need for better preservation of his buildings; too many of Woollen’s most important works have been altered in careless, ahistorical ways, their original design intent distorted, their impact for future users dulled. However, these structures can’t be understood as purely historical artifacts—vestiges of a mid-century moment of optimistic invention that, it must be said, feels increasingly out of sync with the world we live in today. Instead, we see Woollen’s architecture as something closer to a living manifestation of Indianapolis’s civic fabric. His buildings are places where spatial design and social engagement converge, where countless Indianapolis residents have lived, worked, played, learned, and worshiped, and continue to do so. Never static, they are, as Woollen put it, in a perpetual “process of becoming.”²⁹ Frameworks for the richness of communal life, their meaning accrues in layers, revealed only after generations of use—if we let them. Will we?

“Music takes time to experience its full impact, but architecture, I would argue, takes much more time,” Woollen said near the end of his life.³⁰ “There can be a factor of slow release. Sometimes a building is despised at the beginning and beloved at the end—or the reverse, it must be admitted. I will abide by the end myself.”