How Architecture Found Me

It all started with my dad.

He was a fighter pilot and an aeronautical engineer who taught me the magic of lift and the concept of flight. It spawned a visceral love of carving space in time, like a football arcing through the air to intersect a pair of outstretched arms or a ballet dancer leaping through space before sticking a perfect landing. For me, it was quite simply about the spatial interaction of the animate with the inanimate.

After a lifelong diversion into a passion for words and the construction of fiction I realized that my true love lie in the manipulation of gravity and the creation of space. In the final semester of my pursuit of a bachelor’s degree in English Literature at Denison University someone said: “you’re taking sculpture and dance and you rearrange your room a lot, have you ever thought about Architecture?” I was totally taken aback, and upon graduation I enrolled in an Architectural History class at Ohio State University.

SALA Architect Eric Odor

The professor was part of an eleven member International Preservation Commission who was totally into photogrammetry in his documentation of significant structures around the world resulting in 3D slide shows. He would step back fifty feet from his subject and take a slide and then move 4’ to his right and take another slide, and once back in class he would employ two projectors and polarized glasses of red and green to bathe the students in space. When I walked into class it seemed as if half the university was in attendance, and the red and white striped arches of the Mosque of Cordoba were flying over our heads. I never recovered.

Thanks dad!