"If you meet Craig Hodgetts, it's hard not to be swept up by his general enthusiasm--not just about architecture, but about people, cars, cities, and surfing.  That gusto permeates his writings, which span nearly half a century, condenses and collected into this volume.  Divided into four categories--polemics, projects, people, and performances--the book unveils the ideas and possibilities that have influenced Hodgett's architectural work."  —Deane Madsen, Architectural Record

Topography of the Heart

As a child in Greensboro, North Carolina, I loved the secret places beyond the lawns where
birds nested, where they chirruped and scratched in the leaves and sat on their speckled eggs.
I discovered these mossy nooks because my mother frequently locked me out of the house.

This is not as bad as it sounds. I’m grateful that I had the freedom to wander outdoors alone or
with friends. If life is a journey, it’s good to know about the dark woods and the ditches early on.

Later I studied in London, living alone in a working-class neighborhood north of Kentish Town.
In the street below my window, neighborhood children played until teatime. They, too, were
locked out. At dusk, the “tellies” began to wink behind lace curtains and mothers called to their
children.

I suspect these outdoor kids came to love that particular scrap of London as much as my friends
and I loved our patch of woods in North Carolina. We would find better places, though never a
place so real.

“Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors,” Henry David
Thoreau wrote, “even in wet and cold.”

"Feels like 44,” the radio announced as I drove into a parking garage in Aix-en-Provence recently. That’s 111° Fahrenheit. 

On the pavement outside the garage, a woman of about 50 sat crumpled against a wall. Her black garments looked hot. “My husband is dead,” her little cardboard sign said. I dropped a Euro in her paper cup. If this were a novel, I’d imagine she’d wind up being one of those grey-haired ladies in black who sat on doorsteps at dusk.

"Respectable people,” wrote the novelist Emile Zola, a native son of Aix. “What bastards!”

At lunch in a restaurant gilded like a church, I sat near a lady who wore a lace shawl. Her back was straight as a poker and never touched her chair. Here was a daughter of privilege, my novel would say, a properly equipped middle-class woman whose life was set.

Maybe she thought I was a retired priest, possibly disgraced. 

But later that afternoon as I strolled down the Cours Mirabeau, one of the most beautiful streets in France, I saw the woman in black, not crumpled against a wall but seated in a cafe, shaded by plane trees, sipping a lemonade. She smiled.

It sure felt like 44°.