We learn things every day in the practice of architecture. On these pages we share new developments, discoveries pro and con about established ideas, whatever we think might interest you .

I started my career building a playground in a poor neighborhood in Troy, N.Y., after my senior year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. As I watched local kids enact pop-star performances on a pyramidal platform at one end of the big sand box, I realized that the creation of formal objects is just a beginning.   They leave our hands and are inhabited by their users in ways we cannot possibly imagine.

Design should always start with big ideas, but, paradoxically, good big ideas can only occur in the synthesis of thousands of small details. That’s why you are going to see on this site a focus on very specific, material things, and only occasionally the philosophic comment.  And like the kids on the playground, I’m hoping our readers will surprise and amaze us with their comments.

Pete Retondo