JUNE 30, 2021 – My wife and I possess the good fortune of having architects among our friends, even relatives. Members of other professions number among our friends and relatives too, but architects are in a special group. They’re “practical artists.” Back in the good ol’ days, architects actually had to draw—with hand-held instruments—and build scale models out of balsa wood cut with an Exacto knife.
Not long ago, I learned that our architect friend Jim, who spent his career working mainly on large hospital facilities, is a highly accomplished watercolorist. (His wife showed us photos of his pictures she’d saved to her phone.) I’d never known this about Jim, who is also a Bonsai tree artist, but I’m hardly surprised, though duly impressed.
Years ago when we engaged another architect friend, Bart, to draw our “dream lake home,” he produced a spectacular rendition. Our builder then asked, “How many millions is your budget?” That was the last of Bart’s dream, though not the last of our (vastly downsized) lake home, which we designed ourselves. Bart went on to prize-winning work at the Minnesota Zoo, among many other assignments. I went on to build a shed.
Then there’s our “non-relative relative,” Ed Nilsson, an architect whom I met via errant emails from a member of my book club, who’d used “enilsson@” instead of “enils@” (Ed went to the trouble of looking up our home phone number and called me. He and his wife Frances happened to have season tickets to my oldest sister’s chamber orchestra in Boston. They became fast-friends—more on that in a moment.) Ed specializes in historic preservation architecture, but the Nilsson home in Marblehead is a masterpiece of modern architecture.
Ed and Frances introduced us to their architect friend—long-time architecture critic for The New York Times, the late and inimitable Ada Louise Huxtable.
Among our actual relatives, albeit not a Nilsson, is a prize-winning Swedish architect, Christin Svensson, who’s worked on projects around the world for Dutch, Belgian, and Danish architectural firms. Christin’s great-grandfather was my grandmother’s favorite brother, and Christin clearly inherited her great-grandfather’s expansive imagination.
The son of our good friend LuAnne is an architect. When he was a young kid, I’d think, “He’s smart—I wonder what he’ll wind up doing when he grows up?” I’m not surprised by his chosen profession. (His sister is an astrophysicist.)
What all these architects have in common is . . . imagination, coupled with a practiced sense of design and the practical necessities of functional architecture.
Then there’s Scrabble. My sister Kristina happens to be an incomparable Scrabble player—of little surprise to us who are familiar with her unrivaled command of English. But she maintains that the best Scrabble players aren’t English majors or language mavens but . . . architects. Architects have a highly developed eye for structure, and the most “lucrative” Scrabble strategy involves building off existing words in multiple directions. Kristina introduced Ed Nilsson to the game, and sure enough, he became a tour de force at the Scrabble board.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
