"Perhaps we did it in the spirit of creating a house, or perhaps simply to protect us from the sun, but in any case, we did it quite meticulously," the architect remembers.
On this bright and impossibly hot morning we find ourselves at the Singapore PSA, the world's largest container transshipment hub, in the company of our guide Mark, PSA's jockey-turned-architect. Meticulously coiffed and sporting polka-dot socks, Mark guides us through the functionings of this globally significant port.
The Italian architect Piero Lissoni meticulously restored the west facade and enclosed it in an enormous glass box to create a soaring light-filled atrium, which now serves as a sleek lobby and brasserie buzzing with a well-heeled crowd.
It was bought by the philanthropist and collector Frederick Koch in 1986, and was meticulously renovated by Mr. Young, the architect, a few years later.
"If it's worth something it would be nice to get something for it before I die," said the 70-year-old architect, who has meticulously saved just about everything he's ever produced, from cardboard chair prototypes to silver-paper models of the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao, Spain.
So for two years, he laid the foundations for his dream: he got the necessary permits to tear down his mother-in-law's 100-year-old house, he got the blueprints from an architect, and he meticulously planned and designed every room of the two-family house that would one day be a home for him and his wife and their two boys and even his mother-in-law.
Unlike Soane, who meticulously considered every corner, here the architect Richard Meir seems to have lost the plot.
As the Archdiocese of New York embarks on a five-year, $175 million renovation of what has been described as the nation's largest Roman Catholic Gothic sanctuary, architects and historians have meticulously reviewed every detail of James Renwick Jr.'s original blueprints.
Modern Haven $1,095,000 NEW JERSEY: 7 Old Quarry Road, Cedar Grove A three-bedroom, two-bath single-level contemporary, designed and built in 1967 by an architect for himself, then meticulously restored by a second owner.
Rather than remove the big boulders and start with a clear site, as any sane architect would, he has meticulously arranged the rooms and furniture of the homes around the great rocks, all to be topped with a 300m-long wafer-thin roof.
