Returning in 1966 from two years in Paris and Florence on a Yale traveling scholarship, where he sketched Brancusi sculptures and admired what he called the "geometry and weight" of early Renaissance painter Mantegna, Serra settled in a coldwater industrial loft in Soho and started from scratch—literally from the scrapheap. He was drawn to the back-to-basics sculpture of Carl Andre and Donald Judd. Their obdurate installations of bricks and machine-tooled objects appealed to Serra's own outsider instincts. Minimalism, as such work came to be called, wasn't about minimal size; it had to do with minimal means and minimal meaning. Andre's industrial tiles and metal plates laid out on the floor seemed to rebuff interpretation; they were what they were. Soon after his return to New York, Serra (who calls himself a post-Minimalist) scavenged a load of discarded scrap rubber from a Soho warehouse. He wrote a list of verbs, a Minimalist poem of directives, on a sheet of paper, one of which was "To Lift." When he lifted one side of a sheet of vulcanized rubber—a rough, primitive-looking substance that resembles tar on a hot day—the resulting form looked like something you might crawl into, like a kid's pup tent on the lawn, or the pocket of a wave.