The Year of the Boat - [Excerpt]
Beauty, Imperfection, and the Art of Doing It Yourself
Sasquatch Books 2008

It began as a project to build a wooden sailboat in a suburban garage within a self-imposed deadline of one year. But difficulties—both technical and emotional—made a shambles of the deadline, and Lawrence Cheek’s project to build a boat became an inquiry into the nature of beauty, a struggle with obsession and perfectionism, and finally a question of character. The Year of the Boat is the story of how one man built a boat in spite of himself.

An architecture critic builds his own home
Published in crosscut.com Feb. 24, 2009

What happens when an architecture critic designs a house? It’s not quite the same as if a music critic were to attempt the “Emperor” Concerto, or a restaurant critic commandeer Canlis’s kitchen for the night. Those events would be ephemeral, hustled quickly into past tense if not quite forgotten. I’m living in this house for the rest of my life.

I’ve nourished a passion for architecture for the last three decades, writing regularly on it for national magazines and newspapers, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for the past four years. I studied architecture history in grad school, but took no hands-on design courses; I never craved to actually practice architecture. This was wise. When I built my sailboat, I noticed that I have an almost immaculate inability to visualize three-dimensional objects from two-dimensional plans. The boat works, but only because I built most of it twice. I have to see something in three dimensions to understand why it doesn’t work, then take it apart and do it over again. This is what I do as architecture critic, just omitting the do-over part. [More]