* A woman can’t mess up, Helen said. It’s like when you’re a girl and you’re told you summoned your own disaster. “I have to work alone. Women are cheated in the partnerships of our industry. Eileen Gray and the E-1027 villa is the foremost instance. Le Corbusier saw it and was smitten, so without asking for permission, he painted murals on the immaculate walls. She was furious. It was a violation. This architectural pissing act caused the press to credit it to him. I suppose there’s justice in the fact that he had this restless fascination with the machinery of aviation but did not die in the air. While he was swimming his daily laps, he drowned right by that villa.”

* Helen Dannenforth, too, has a fondness for the contradiction inherent to hubs of transit, which is why that train station in Spain will branch like dissected capillaries and arteries to dramatize the many pathways of a voyage.

* In a study of unknowability, Studio Forth was commissioned for a church in France at the base of the Jura Mountains. It is a dome of obscure dimensions, a cocoon of mist sourced from Lake Bourget. Inside, a plexiglass column extends to an oculus through which water is poured and frozen, then the plexiglass removed. The notion was Cartesian. If the soul was like a wax, recognizable as a paraffin taper or a melted padella, god could be understood as hydrogen—as vapor, as solid, and as liquid after a chilling encounter. The column has to be continually replaced, since it is suspended in an endless process of wearing away from a patina of fingerprints.