Читать книгу Sticks & Stones / Steel & Glass - Anthony Poon - Страница 3

Author's Note

I’ve designed a massive library and a sports complex, sprawling homes and stylish restaurants, projects that took years—and yet this book has been my most difficult project. Not that I have secrets to tell, and I hope nothing here sounds like I’m full of myself. I try openly to laugh at my mistakes. But I do want to see the larger meanings in my life’s work.

The thing is, a book like this is not a straight line from my T-square. Whatever blueprint I started with has changed dozens of times midconstruction. Critiques I wrote a few years ago lost their steam over time and were dropped, while new projects shed a fresh light on topics I wanted to address in words as well as in lines and angles.

There was a time early on when this book was just a diary in which I wanted to write outrageously about architecture, as Anthony Bourdain did about cooking in Kitchen Confidential. Silly me. This book is not a memoir but rather is (somewhat) the trace of my life, my journey in the world of architecture and design—though it is not chronological.

I revel in the scope of exploration; I want to design everything, to be deeply invested in all creative aspects of a project. I want each minute or broad stroke of my architecture and design work to facilitate enriched lives for all who walk through the doors or look in or out of the windows of anything I create. And I celebrate that I have been allowed to sketch out visions for uplifting structures. Once I did so alongside a spiritual leader totally at peace with himself.

Something I’m still striving to be.