This article was originally published on Common Edge.

About 50 years ago, the renowned architect, educator, and author Charles Moore was hired by Frederick and Dorothy Rudolph to design a vacation house on Captiva Island, Florida, and about a decade later, in the late 1970s, they hired him again to design their permanent residence in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Moore was often called the father of Postmodernism and was a prolific proponent through such books as The Place of Houses. With the exception of his small houses, however, I was never a big fan of his work. But I still have a tattered copy of that book, because when I read it, it was the first time that someone had articulated the process of designing a house, including a programmatic checklist to follow.

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This article was originally published on Common Edge.

In 2005, while I was an architecture student at Columbia, visions of Bilbao danced through my classmates’ heads as they flocked to an architecture studio whose brief was to design an all-new Guggenheim Museum on Governors Island. I will admit that the prospect of exhibiting a spectacle for Columbia’s end-of-year show was seductive. But conducting field research for that class required only subway and ferry rides, while a studio offering in the historic preservation program promised a trip to Rome. I passed on creating another paper icon for New York and traveled to the Esposizione Universale Roma for one week that fall.