The honking of the geese going south was beginning to get on his nerves. How to work with that going on. And the library was getting colder. The day had been grey, the soil damp, the air raw and feeling like snow. It might snow tonight. Not a long walk home though—and the apartment was at least warm. If it wasn't for the people upstairs, creaking, stamping (or that's what it sounded like), and shouting—but maybe just talking given the thin walls. Maybe they were using Skype—his own had long since ceased to connect. Needs a new password, or better, someone to call. He had felt the walls this morning—damp and a little soft— old plasterboard, wooden panels slightly buckled from heat and damp in that order. How could they let the housing get so run-down? But that was how monasteries worked, and this, all said and done, was a sort of monastery. Without the religion of course. But religion was there all right—under the radar, couched in academic formulae, a kind of ersatz nonbelief in belief. He had heard it at lunch—the endless parroting of rehashed research, of half-baked theories, of platitudes about how good the food was, or how much better the food was yesterday, or how interesting the mixed cold vegetarian salad was, or that you couldn't count on anything these days, or you are new here aren't you? Kindly inquiries, sensitive overtures, only half-listening to the replies.

There is an exhibition currently hanging in the penthouse of the Museum of Modern Art in New York: Far removed from the clamor of the street and the jostling of the crowd, a selection of delicately conceived and exquisitely executed drawings remind us that, even in the age of pragmatism, ideal architecture still preoccupies creative minds. From the recent past and the lived present, these studies speak of impossible futures, irresistible impulses, and inconsequential fantasies. Hoary technotopia from Archigram; satyrical dreamscapes from Superstudio; metalinguistics from Argentina's nouvelle vague; eclecticism, superrationalism, and painterly metaphor from New York's (and Princeton's) Five add up to form a picture of the whole tangled web of idealism and counter-idealism that has constituted today's attempt at visionary architecture. This exhibition raises, as do all such manifestations of the realm of utopia, questions as to the relation between art and daily life.

I was born on July 4, 1941, in East Knoyle, Wiltshire. Some symbolic import might be gained from the fact that East Knoyle was also the birthplace of Christopher Wren and close to Philip Webb's mansion “Clouds”; also symbolic, given my later life in the United States, was the date itself. My family moved back to Essex later that year. My memories of the war must date from late 1944 and the first months of 1945: air-raid sirens, the huddle beneath the kitchen table (a steel Morrison shelter), the whining of V-2s toward the end of the war, and even once a shock wave that pushed me to the pavement. Also, a few weeks of evacuation to my grandparents in Warwickshire, close to Coventry, which had sustained the better part of the 1941 blitz, and to another shelter, dug in the back garden, of reinforced concrete, damp and cool and a favorite hideout.