A Place of My Own

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

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.

Progress slows. Or at least it appears to, since it is by now such a subtle thing, measured in increments of smoothness and craftsmanship and in to-do lists done rather than in changes at the scale of a landscape or elevation. No one big thing, finish work consists of a great variety of discrete tasks, many niggling, some inspiring, but none you wo

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 t

From the admiring accounts I read, one might conclude that white ash is up there with the opposable thumb in driving the advance of human civilization. It’s hard to think of a wood more obliging to man than ash—a tree that supplies the handles for the very axes used to cut down other trees. The reason ash makes such a satisfactory tool handle is th

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.

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

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

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.