It’s just before five o’clock, some weekend in March of 1981, and I haven’t been out of the apartment all day. Just me in my bathrobe, hunched over my mostly finished cardboard model of my Winery design, back aching right between the shoulder blades, and two day’s worth of cardboard debris scattered about the apartment living room. My two roomies are gone for the weekend, so I get to go nuts and do whatever I need to do to get my design ready for the final critique in a few days. I sustain myself with music of my choosing and [...]

It was working out pretty good knowing by age eleven that I wanted to spend my life drawing up cool stuff. In fifth grade my buddy Paul and I had an unofficial “drawing club” where we assigned ourselves all these detailed drawings of jets and tanks and things like that. We would meet in the library at recess to admire each other’s effort. Our pal Bob was also sort of involved, though his drawings usually showed more “heart” than technical skill. We always found something to praise. I remember we each drew a cross section that showed a cutaway view [...]

As a student of architecture at UCLA it was always a nice surprise when the little lightening bolts of understanding somehow occurred within me. I loved those “ah-ha” moments when things sorted themselves out and, for a time, the design world became my oyster. It was grad school and the academic climate was actually less regimented than my undergraduate studies had been. No more was it all about a lot of required reading followed by quizzes. Instead we were more on our own to make the most of things, to do our own research, and just be open for insights [...]

It’s 1982 and I’m halfway through my three year stay at the UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and have come to know the rhythms of life here pretty well. Every semester there will be two or three academic classes such as structures or some history class with a lot of slides, but it’s the design class that becomes the real focus for the students. Every semester we’re given a hypothetical design project. Last time all forty of us second-year students each came up with our own design for a city hall on a vacant lot in nearby Culver City. The [...]