There’s a competition in which designers are asked to produce a series of images alongside a story that they also write. Entries tend to be dystopian and meticulously rendered. I had seen an illustrated floor plan of the apartment from Friends and found that every episode—every story—was right there in the drawing. So I made architectural drawings of The Three Little Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and The Princess and the Pea and submitted a text of the conversation that I had with myself in my head.

I didn’t win anything, but there was something there, I think, in the text: You realize that your inability to put your finger on it, that it exists solely in the air between tangible things, between buildings and drawings, its slipperiness, is exactly what makes architecture so adaptable, so resilient, and an effective point of resistance while the world’s cultural content gets eaten up by digitization.