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"An architect's job is harder than a doctor's," an old joke says. "A doctor can bury his mistakes, but all an architect can do is advise the client to plant vines."
This struck me funny as a kid who dreamed of turning his love of drawing into a career as an architect. Heck, I suffered through the awful talking-horse "Mr. Ed" TV series drivel only because Ed's confidant, Wilbur, was an architect.
My most treasured possession as a young teen was a book called "Architectural Graphic Standards," a prescient gift from Uncle Jack. It was so dull that the CIA probably makes terrorists read it at Guantanamo. I would thumb through it for fun.
But somewhere along the line, I recognized two things: I loved people too much to spend solitary days hunched over a drawing board. And my math skills were, well, wanting. The words "collapse" and "jail" hung in my mind.
So I chose journalism, which is how I happened to walk through the doors of the then-new State of Illinois Center in downtown Chicago about 30 years ago. Through the doors and into an architectural disaster I visited regularly.
It was beautiful and...