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.