This was the breakthrough novel that allowed him to leave home, marry, and abandon architecture for a lifetime of writing.
But the book took over; he abandoned architecture, gave up his practice, and did a variety of jobs, all pleasingly exotic - acting, stonemasonry, bookbinding - to make ends meet.
It comes as some surprise that Zurich, the Swiss city renowned for its banks, general order and high quality of living, has lax legislation when it comes to inhabiting abandoned architecture.
Further, his friendships with the avant-garde in various centres of Europe Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Walter Gropius, Salvador Dalí, Federico Garcia Lorca, André Breton, and others—stimulated his interest in the Surrealist movement, and by 1936 he had abandoned architecture as a career.
Escher then studied for a few years at the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem, but he abandoned architecture to try to carve out a career as a graphic artist.
The vividness of Mr. Gitai's war experience, and the questions it raised for him, eventually led him to abandon architecture for filmmaking, so he could record and question history and "touch nerves," he said.
More sweetly poetic are "Mansion Ancestral" and "Fiesta," from 1949 and 1950 respectively, jewel-like nocturnes whose semi-abstract evocations of abandoned architecture can bring to mind Giacometti's "Palace at 4 a.m".
He, too, made a momentous decision in Gallery G of the Armory Show -- to abandon architecture and take his family to Paris to paint.
And while you can snap away at the impressive, if often abandoned, architecture all you like, be polite when pointing your lens at the city's residents.
Ms. Plater-Zyberk said that Princeton had by no means abandoned modern architecture.
