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Esther McCoy                              14

the church facing the heavily traveled street and the large court and pergolaed entrance from a side street.  On the drive back to the office I made the mistake of saying that the solid side had something Egyptian about it,   I was roundly put down.  The lesson I drew, and one which served me well in writing about architects over the the years was that architects are inclined to see each building growling from its own seed alone. 
     The second visit to a site answered one of my questions about sending someone else to oversee construction.  He was usually exhausted when he returned, and he worked at nights at the drawing board; sometimes there was little left of my neat drawing of a morning when I came in, for he might have reoriented the building and had second thoughts about the roof, and after I redrew it there might be additional changes the next night.  Also after his return from the site there were calls to make to the sub-contractors--the plumber, the electrician, the plasterer, often wrangling calls, for he had a clear idea of what he wanted and fought for it.  Someone called him an architect in an ivory tower; during the years I was in the office he was more like a fieldhand with a short hoe.
     There was perhaps another reason for that second visit. It was to dispel my assumption that the many changes of a plane in his walls were not easy to control during construction. I knew the surface flow of an airplane wing, and was accustomed to establish my points and fairing in a line, but were not his recesses and projections hard for a carpenter to follow?   Yet