Architecture and history...

After I graduated, my parents moved to Georgetown in Washington, D.C. I attended Rochester for a year and then transferred to Washington University, where I studied architecture and history. I got my B.A. in 1970 and, after some back-and-forth, moved to Berkeley. In 1974, I married Kathryn Snowden, an ex-New Yorker (born in Greenwich Village) and a Chinese/political science graduate at Berkeley (after long sojourns in Madrid and Taipei). I got a Master of Architecture degree from Berkeley in 1975.

I was in the Ph.D. program until 1978, when I went into practice. Until 1997, I was the marketing director of ever-larger architecture firms, culminating in the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. In parallel, I began what has proven to be a lifelong interest in design journalism and publishing. In 1982, with my wife's sister, Elizabeth Snowden, I founded Design Book Review, which we published until 1999, when we gave it to California College of the Arts. A financial disaster but a critical success, DBR won national awards from the American Institute of Architects and the Industrial Design Society of America, and nominations for a Chrysler Design Award.

In late 1997, Gensler, an even larger architecture and design firm, recruited me from SOM to join their communications group. In 1999, with my colleague Helen Dimoff, I founded Dialogue, Gensler's client magazine. Published three times a year, it has a print run of 15,000 copies. In 2002, I took over as chair of an on-line design journal, LINE (www.linemag.org), sponsored by the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects. During my tenure, LINE won favorable notices in Architectural Record and in the UK's Architects' Journal and Architectural Review. I now co-edit its "Commentary" section. I also review books for Architectural Record and Portus, an Italian quarterly; am the U.S. correspondent for Catalyzer, a Japanese workplace magazine; and serve on the project review committee of SPUR, a non-profit focused on San Francisco development.

We live five blocks north of the Berkeley campus and four blocks uphill from Chez Panisse, the fount of nouvelle cuisine founded by Alice Waters. My wife, now a realtor, owns a string of residential and industrial income properties. Those rents came in handy last fall when we had three college tuitions to handle. She serves on the boards of the North East Berkeley Association and the Berkeley Property Owners Association. Our oldest son Michael, now 30, is an investment banker with Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong. His wife, the Serbian-born mathematician Bojana Miloradovic, is expecting their first child in September. Our son John Ennis, 25, is a journalist who works with the BBC in Birmingham, UK, and our son Ross, 22, is studying business and literature at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. Our daughter (whew!) Elizabeth, 19, now in Paris, just finished her first year at Bard College, two hours up the Hudson from Manhattan.

haven't been back to Mountain Lakes since 1966. My sister, who regularly attends her MLHS reunions, told me that our parents' house was torn down "to make way for what looks like a Day's Inn." Designed by a Connecticut architect who published its prototype in a McCall's book on modern houses that my parents bought when we came back to New Jersey from Singapore in 1953, this remnant of childhood lives on in my head, but North Berkeley and this much-beloved house, built in 1904, are home now. Jack London once lived here, I understand, and I'm happy to follow his example in this one respect.