When people find out this story for the first time (regardless of where they're from), I always get a surprised look and some kind of remark about culture shock: from Cambridge to Mississippi. To a certain degree it's true, but not as much as one might think. But one way it is true has to do with my understanding of the meaning of architecture in these (and other) places. In Cambridge, in the midst of buildings by Corbusier, Saarinen, Richardson, Gropius and the like, architectural meaning comes from an entrenched and sanctioned history of buildings, from the pedigree of its architect, or the conceptual approach to its generation, from the media hype surrounding new work; in essence a lot of the meaning ascribed to a work comes from without, from beyond the borders of the work itself.
But when I moved into this building, and looked around at my new world, I had nothing from without to help me understand the meaning of these things, I had to look within to understand their meaning. At the way the sunlight worked its way across a surface...