sions for museum installations and a new house, and went into business for myself. A few years later I normalized my career path by moving to New York, joining a firm and, twenty-five years later, merging it with another. As a principal I have been responsible for a large number of projects and there are many that I am truly proud of. The projects I like the best were commissioned by institutions with a long view of their own history: for the Central Park Conservancy we designed The Dana Discovery Center; for Spence, Marymount, and Saint David’s schools we designed the expansions of the William G. Lowe mansion, 2 East 82nd Street, and 18 East 89th Street. The addition to Poly Prep’s lower school in Park Slope was an opportunity to create a contemporary addition to an eccentric nineteenth-century mansion, while the conversions of the Casa Italiana at Columbia and Duane Library at Fordham reconnected those two buildings to their campuses. The restoration of Louis Armstrong’s house in Corona allowed me to think about America’s greatest musician, while my restoration of Astor Courts playhouse opened a window into America’s Gilded Age but did not result in an invitation to Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. In addition, I have designed a number of houses and apartments, always with the goal of fitting into, reinforcing, and enhancing an existing context—which is architect-speak for making them look as if they had always been there. These successes have been accompanied by a (hopefully smaller) number of failures, ranging from not getting the job to letting the client down in some way. One of my partners had a saying that we learned more from our failures than from our successes. I hope it is true. It should be possible to reverse-engineer thirty-five years of professional practice characterized by a modest range of accomplishments in order to obtain a few kernels of wisdom. The first is that you have to be genuinely interested in what you do. Remember the story at the beginning about Mies—it is going to take a while to be respected as an architect, so find something to sustain yourself intellectually. When you are right out of school, you are interested in doing just about anything, but eventually you want to refine your focus. My own involves the relationship between new and old architecture, specific