Encounters with Architecture - Insights from a Hundred Places

 

I know Howard Davis, and I don't know him, which is a strange thing to admit about someone I first encountered (the word feels apt given what this review is about) as one of a handful of Alexander acolytes on the University of Oregon faculty in the early 1980s. I knew him the way a student knows any respected professor he never quite got to know personally. What I didn't know, until purchasing Encounters with Architecture: Insights from a Hundred Places, was much of anything about the life that produced it: where Howard grew up, what he studied before architecture, how he came to spend a career moving between Berkeley, Austin, Eugene, and fifty countries beyond. So, this review comes from an odd vantage. I have real stakes in getting it right, but I'm still learning, chapter by chapter, more about who Howard is than I knew before.

I began by reading the book straight through, chronologically, the way Howard organized it. I've since abandoned that discipline in favor of jumping around, reading episodically, chasing whichever chapter title catches my eye. This is partly because I wanted to post this review sooner rather than later. The book rewards this kind of reading almost as well as the linear kind. I am not finished. I don't think that disqualifies me from recommending it, and I'll explain why.

Howard organized Encounters with Architecture as a hundred short essays, two or three pages apiece, each built around a specific place that lodged itself in his memory over a career spanning early training in physics, years at Christopher Alexander's Center for Environmental Structure, decades of teaching at Berkeley, Texas, and Oregon, and fieldwork on six continents. The book runs chronologically in seven parts of uneven length, from a childhood memory of four shops on St. Johns Place in Brooklyn to encounters as recent as 2024. Early on, reading straight through, I started to suspect the book isn't really a hundred essays about architecture. It reads more like a memoir organized around a hundred places, each entry depending on the ones that came before it, even when Howard never says so outright.

I enjoy Howard's writing style, which is not academic, despite a career spent producing the journal articles and conference papers that might have trained the habit into him. I don't find a trace of that vocabulary here. The prose is plain and direct but still evocative, and it avoids the jargon so much architectural writing reaches for when it wants to sound serious. I suspect the book's own structure has something to do with this, since two or three pages per encounter leaves little room for throat-clearing, and Howard has to arrive at what mattered about a place quickly. Whatever the reason, the result is a book I can pick up for ten minutes or an hour, in whatever order suits me that day, and come away from either with something worth keeping.

Take the chapter on the Inner Shrine at Ise, in Japan, which is the best one I've read so far. Howard describes the whole approach on a day of drizzle: the long train ride down from Kyoto, the stands of cypress and cedar, the bridges, the stairs, the succession of gateways that keep the innermost shrine perpetually out of reach. He counts it among the two or three most powerful encounters in the book, and the chapter earns that claim through sheer particularity: a specific day, a specific stretch of weather, a route walked in a specific order, rather than anything Howard tells the reader to think about it. That particularity is, I suspect, the book's real method when the method is working; Howard doesn't explain a place so much as walk you through arriving at it. 

A chapter on a neighborhood in Cairo, by contrast, is the weakest one I've come across so far. The neighborhood itself barely appears in any specificity. Howard writes instead about a more general feeling for the city, which he extends outward to "all great cities" rather than keeping it tied to the specific streets he set out to describe. It's the one entry I've read so far where the book turns abstract.

One small thing worth noting, more as an aside than an argument: Howard gives each chapter a subtitle that distills its lesson into a phrase, "The sacred over the profane," "Sheltering daily life," and so on. It reminded me of the pattern-naming he must have done firsthand during his years working alongside Alexander.

I warmly recommend this book, partly because of Howard's like-mindedness with concerns I've long circled: place, memory, what a life's worth of attention leaves behind. And partly because of where I am in my own life right now: retired, with the leisure to read a book like this the way it deserves to be read, and enough architecture behind me of my own to recognize someone who views architecture as I do. I'm not sure this is a book for everyone. If pressed to pass it on to only one actual person I know, it wouldn't be an architect. It'd be a young twenty-something friend of mine, a philosophy graduate, who asks better questions about buildings than most people who get paid to design them. That says less about who's likely to buy the book than about the kind of mind it rewards, which is one with a disposition toward noticing.

Architecture is Awesome: #43 Market Halls and the Bustle of Commerce

Reading Terminal Market (all photos by me unless noted otherwise).

This is another in my series of posts inspired by 1000 Awesome Things, the Webby Award-winning blog written by Neil Pasricha. The series is my meditation on the awesome reasons why I was and continue to be attracted to the art of architecture. 

Step through the threshold of a great market hall and the city changes register. Outside, traffic and sidewalks. Inside, a hundred small, competing voices: fishmongers and flower sellers, the clatter of crates, the smell of bread and brine mixing in the air. It should feel like chaos. Most of the time, it doesn't. Something is holding it together, and that something is architecture — a spatial discipline that turns bustle into legibility. 

Market halls earn a place in this series because they are one of the few building types where architecture, commerce, and community refuse to separate from one another. The building doesn't just shelter the market. It disciplines it, gathering a chaotic diversity of independent vendors into a single legible place. That discipline is precisely what allows the market to function as something more than a shopping trip: an authentic community hub, rooted in a specific city, offering an alternative to the placeless sameness of standard retail. 

Reading Terminal Market (photo by ajay_suresh, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market is a useful place to start, though its architecture works a little differently than a postcard image might suggest. The soaring arched train shed above — now the Pennsylvania Convention Center's Grand Hall and Ballroom — belonged to the Reading Railroad's locomotives and tracks, not to the market. Since 1893, the market has occupied the ground floor and basement instead, the practical undercroft beneath the elevated train deck. Its columns and low ceiling weren't designed with retail in mind at all; they were sized to carry the load of a railroad overhead. But that engineering, not any deliberate design intent, is what produces the spatial legibility the market needed. The discipline arrived by accident. 

And yet that undercroft still does the same disciplining work. Its grid of columns and low, even ceiling height impose a legible order on 78,000 square feet and more than 80 independent merchants: Amish dairy stands, a century-old ice cream counter, butchers next to booksellers, none of them told what to sell or how to dress their stall. Walk the market's wide central corridors, and you can't see every vendor at once, but you can always see the shape of the whole. That's the market hall's architecture at work. It doesn't standardize the vendors; it standardizes the container. Each stall stays idiosyncratic, with hand-lettered signs, mismatched displays, a hundred small acts of local enterprise, while the columns and aisles impose just enough order that the whole reads as one place rather than a hundred unrelated ones. Take away that discipline, and you have a flea market. Add it back, and you have an institution. 

Granville Island Public Market.

Vancouver's Granville Island Public Market makes the same argument from a different angle. Where Reading Terminal encloses, Granville Island opens. It's a low-slung, industrial-vernacular market hall built from the bones of a 1917 industrial site, its corrugated siding and exposed structure left frankly utilitarian. The architecture here isn't a grand civic gesture. It's deferential to its setting: a working waterfront wedged between the bridge and False Creek.

That deference is the point. Granville Island's power comes less from its structure than from where the structure sits: deep in the urban and geographic fabric of Vancouver, reachable from downtown by a five-minute ferry hop across the creek, framed by the bridge, the boat repair yards, and the artists' studios that share the island. The market doesn't just serve the city; it is legible as Vancouver in a way a generic pavilion, dropped anywhere, could never be. Urban embeddedness is its own kind of architectural discipline. Siting, scale, and context do the work here that the grid of columns does at Reading Terminal. 

Lonsdale Quay Market.

North Vancouver's Lonsdale Quay Market and Montreal's Jean Talon Market each add their own variation on the same theme. Lonsdale Quay pairs a working SeaBus terminal with a market hall, so commuting and shopping share the same waterfront threshold. It's architecture again holding two functions, and two publics, in one frame. Worth noting: Lonsdale Quay doesn't dress itself up as something older than it is. Built in the mid-1980s on a former waterfront industrial brownfield alongside the SeaBus terminal, its architecture is frankly of its own era rather than a costume borrowed from history. Authenticity here isn't a matter of age. It's a matter of the building being honest about what it is and when it was made. 

Jean Talon Market

Jean Talon, sheltered under roofs but open at the sides to the street, shows that the discipline doesn't require full enclosure. A strong roofline and a well-defined edge are enough, even without walls. Closer to home, Eugene's own Saturday Market pushes that idea further still. There's no building at all, just temporary tents and a plaza, and yet it's as central to the city's sense of itself as any market hall is to Philadelphia or Vancouver. Placeness doesn't always require a building. 

What these marketplaces have in common is what that architectural discipline, in whatever form it takes, makes possible: independent makers instead of chain retail, experiential encounters instead of transactions, a place that reflects the specific culture and economy of its region rather than a franchise formula that could be dropped into any city in North America. These are festival marketplaces in the original sense. Commerce, entertainment, and local identity fuse into a single building type, revitalizing the urban districts around them and giving regional producers a stage they couldn't build alone. 

I'd stop short of calling the market hall a rare building type, though. If anything, its very success is its risk. The "festival marketplace" formula — reclaimed industrial shed, curated local vendors, artisanal signage — has proliferated widely enough that it now has its own imitators: market halls built from scratch to look authentic rather than grown from an actual place and its actual history. The architecture can be copied. The roof, the columns, the exposed brick are all reproducible. Harder to fake is the accumulated specificity: decades of a particular city's vendors, habits, and produce settling into a particular building until the two are inseparable. A market hall built yesterday to resemble Reading Terminal is not Reading Terminal, no matter how faithfully it borrows the silhouette. 

The good ones, the real ones, still earn the label. A market hall that holds a hundred small, competing acts of local enterprise together under one disciplined roof, in a place specific enough that it couldn't be anywhere else, is architecture doing something no other building type quite manages: making commerce feel like community. That's AWESOME.

Next Architecture is Awesome: #44 The Architecture of Waiting

The Suburban Dream and the Civic Ledger

 

Salinas_mcMansion.jpg: Brendelderivative work: NVO, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

Mark Zweig posted something on LinkedIn recently that brought a familiar tension back into view: the mismatch between the suburban dream many people still hold and the fiscal realities cities face in trying to support it.

He opened with a jab we've all heard before: architects sneering at “McMansions,” from the vantage point of homes that reflect their own tastes—mid‑century, Victorian, bungalow, or something they designed themselves—many of them with small closets and electrical systems that show their age at inconvenient moments.

My wife and I know this condition well. Our 1,000‑square‑foot house on 34th Avenue was built in 1952, and until last year our electrical system did exactly what he describes. We finally upgraded it as part of a deferred maintenance project, but for decades we lived with the quirks and compromises of an older home. Our neighborhood is an early, modest version of suburbia: small houses on small lots, built when 34th Avenue was near Eugene’s southern edge. Today, miles of similar neighborhoods extend farther south, but the underlying pattern remains low‑density, single‑family, and residential.

That’s important context. I don’t live in a McMansion, but I do live within the development pattern that has shaped this debate. I understand the appeal of space, privacy, and a quiet street. It’s part of my daily life.

Mark’s larger point is straightforward. Millions of people love the suburban ideal: the cul‑de‑sac, the walk‑in closet, the bonus room, the fenced yard, the predictable streets where children can ride their bikes. These preferences aren’t moral failings. They're simply human. They’ve been reinforced for generations by culture, mortgage financing, transportation investments, and zoning codes that made this version of the American Dream seem both normal and attainable.

The dream itself has become more varied in recent years. Housing costs, changing demographics, and shifting priorities have broadened what many people want from a neighborhood. Even so, Mark’s post reminds us of an enduring cultural truth: people value space, privacy, comfort, and a measure of separation from the activity around them.

The civic ledger tells a different story. 

This is where Joe Minicozzi’s work becomes relevant. Joe, founder of Urban3, has spent years showing how patterns of development affect a city's long-term finances. Back in 2015, I wrote about his presentation for the Making Great Cities series, where he showed that compact downtown parcels typically generate dramatically more tax revenue per acre than low‑density suburban development while requiring proportionally less infrastructure to serve them. 

His work reveals something that isn’t obvious when we’re choosing where to live: every development pattern is also an entry in a city’s balance sheet. Streets, water lines, sewer systems, parks, and public services all carry long‑term costs, and those costs don’t necessarily align with our personal preferences. That’s the tension. 

People want space, privacy, and comfort. 

Cities need development patterns they can afford to maintain.

Neither truth invalidates the other. In fact, the debate becomes more productive once we acknowledge that both are legitimate. 

Architects often find themselves caught in the middle, criticized as elitists for questioning suburban expansion while recognizing the fiscal realities cities eventually confront. Yet the real issue isn’t architectural taste. Whether we prefer walk‑in closets or walkable neighborhoods tells us very little about what a city can afford over the long run. 

Perhaps that’s the lesson hiding beneath this familiar debate. We naturally evaluate housing choices at the scale of our own lives. Do we need the extra bedroom, the larger yard, the quieter street? Cities must evaluate those same choices at another scale entirely, where thousands of individual decisions accumulate into miles of pavement, acres of infrastructure, and decades of public obligations. 

The suburban dream and the civic ledger are not opposing visions. They are two ways of seeing the same landscape—one at the scale of individual lives, the other at the scale of the community that sustains them. The challenge isn't choosing between them. It's learning to see through both lenses at once.