A Place of My Own

In the years since Venturi built his mother’s house and published his two seminal manifestos, it has become the conventional wisdom, at least among architecture’s avant-garde, that architecture is a kind of language and that all its various elements—the gables and arches and columns, the axes and patterns of fenestration and materials—are best unde

Mies decided to trim the exterior of the Seagram building with purely decorative I-beams when the building code forced him to cake the real ones in layers of unsightly fire retardant.

Stewart Brand, the author of a recent book on preservation called How Buildings Learn, tells of asking one architect what he learned from revisiting his buildings. “Oh, you never go back,” the architect said, surprised at the question. “It’s too discouraging.” For many contemporary architects, time is the enemy of their art.

I have a theory that a writer’s second book, which is what this one is for me, is the most difficult to write and the most revealing to read. To borrow a metaphor from geometry, a first book is like a point in the infinite space of literary possibility: it can be about anything and leads nowhere in particular.

Some days I even got to be the head carpenter in charge, Joe manning the chop saw while I called for lengths of lumber. What it felt like now was a pretty good job, one poised on that fine-point where it is no longer daunting yet still reliably supplies days of novelty and challenge. The hours slipped by, and the end of each workday brought the sat

But this work went so smoothly that I decided, what the hell, why don’t you see if you can’t figure out how to trim a window. And this is what I set out to do the following day, working at a pace so excruciatingly deliberate it would undoubtedly have gotten me fired had I not been the boss. But turtling through the work as I did seemed in itself an

But a writer’s second book, by forming a second point in the space of literary possibility, creates a line: a path or trajectory that very often sets the course of the writer’s career.

It is not until you embark on your second book that you begin to find out who you are as a writer. This happens in the course of discovering which of the questions that occupied you in the writing of your first book are dropped, and which turn out to be ones that you can’t let go of. A Place of My Own is the book where that happened for me, and loo

The reason I didn’t have a normal, dad-built tree house is that, as I’ve indicated, I didn’t have anything even approaching that kind of dad. He was, and remains, one of the world’s great indoorsmen, a delegator of all conceivable outdoor tasks—lawn mowing, car washing, gutter cleaning, and tree-house building. By the time I was ten, which was when