Petrified Drawing

We arrive on-site in sunshine. Carpenters are busy, singing loudly along to the radio: an uninhibited celebration of tunelessness. They are erecting the wooden frame that, as Rob puts it, “is beginning to make the house seem real.” “That’s exciting!” Tomas remarks, eyes lighting up with obvious satisfaction. “The experience of seeing a design built is always strange and always exciting,” he later remarks. “As an architect, you spend time coming up with ideas, playing around with sketches. Everything seems very abstract and conceptual. Then you arrive on-site and suddenly it’s all very real. Walls are being erected, concrete set. You think, ‘Someone’s actually built it’—you’re like, ‘it was only an idea!’ ” He describes returning to a completed building, and the uncanny sense of literally inhabiting your own imagination: “I’m now inside my drawing!”...