Henri Cole Threepenny Review

"And within architecture I chose the area that was as far from poetry as possible, which was the calculus of structures, and I’m a specialist in the calculus of structures. This was one of the things I got most right in my life. In my work as an architect I have always been very closely related with the work itself. I’m a man who does the field work. When I went to visit the work every day the first thing I did was to look for the bars around it. When I’d found one that was fairly quiet and well-hidden from the work—any work of architecture takes one or two years, and every week you go to visit the work—I always went a couple of hours early, and I went to the bar to be a poet. So from poetry to calculus of structures I passed in a matter of seconds. If you’re writing scripts for the radio, in contrast, you can’t make that step so quickly." Joan Margarit • Quarterly Conversation