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

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.

Nor was Charlie particularly concerned that Joe and I hide our every mistake behind a piece of trim. On the subject of error he liked to quote Ruskin, who had defended the craftsman against the inhumanity of the machine by declaring that “No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of

Once it was the philosophers, now it is the so-called digerati. The game, however, seems very much the same. But architecture would do well to distrust this sort of flattery, because the cyberculture’s interest in place is cynical and ultimately very slight. For what finally is the ultimate architectural expression of the information culture we’re

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

Different kinds of work, performed with different sets of tools, can disclose different faces of the world, and my work in the garden had revealed a face of nature I’d never seen before, not as a reader or a spectator. What I’d gleaned there was a taste of what the “green thumb” has in abundance, this almost bodily sense of plants and the earth

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.

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.

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