At the beginning of 2022, I reached the three-quarter point in a trajectory that, if you’re remembered by others, provides them with a marker, your centenary. In 2019, Richard Bender and I contributed to a book marking that of Giancarlo de Carlo, the late Italian architect and planner. …

At the start of the 1972 academic year, Berkeley architect and U.C. Berkeley Professor Sandy Hirshen introduced me to Richard Bender and we began a 5o-year writing partnership. We went back so far that calling him Richard, not Dick, was never a natural act. It isn’t easy to sum up…

Early in the pandemic, we saw a brief, rapid clearing of the air. We also learned firsthand when and for whom face-to-face interaction mattered. Young schoolchildren struggled, but older kids and desk workers, including architects, quickly adjusted. Some employers are trying to reverse the tide. Wednesdays appear to be the…

“Took the bus,” my writing partner said, quoting his grandmother’s euphemism for “just died.” In a voicemail he left some days before, he noted the tests he was about to undergo, told me that nothing was life-threatening, then added, “It’s circling.” In the fifth part of Eliot’s century-old poem, “The…

Terroir is a term from viniculture, referring to the character of a site as it influences the grapes and the wines. It wraps up a host of features, from topography and climate to soil conditions and geological features. It looks at a vineyard as the intersection of nature and purposeful…

“Pictoribus atque poetis quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas.” (Horace, Ars Poetica) License is traditionally granted to artists and poets, Horace notes, passing over the perils they face from power and the crowd. The boundaries each sets out are inexact and fluid. Sudden, unexpected shifts are prompted by offense taken…

A contretemps on Twitter, entirely my fault, surfaced some tangents that I want to explore. The prompting question, “Is this an essay or a book?” led me to think first about the differences in length that prompt choices about form. I then thought of e-books, which in theory can be…

River’s a good choice I was lying awake trying to decide what to do next given my failure, when a doorway drew itself on the wall — there’s no other way to describe it. It opened out to a terrace, a lawn and hedges behind it. A rustling sound grew…

Watching Emmanuel Macron fulminate in the wake of Boris Johnson’s Great Power realignment brought Charles de Gaulle to mind. …