This building, designed by David Wild, is now very near to completion: it provides an artist’s studio and connecting top-lit rooms arranged in an interlocking L-shaped configuration.

David Wild is making a rare return to academic life this autumn, as visiting professor in the architecture department at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). On 5 November he will give a lecture there on the themes of the book. And before this, on 29 October, he will talk at Columbia University, New York.

David Wild was invited to make a collage for the cover (front and back) of the 100th issue of the magazine Architecture Today (July 1999). His brief was to show 18 of the building projects featured in the preceding 99 issues of the magazine: readers were then invited to identify the buildings. The result is more of a patchwork image than he usually makes; but the piece is held together by a dream-like connecting thread. Inside the magazine, Wild is among the people asked in a symposium ‘where in the world would you choose to go back to?’ His answer: the Norris Dam, Tennessee, USA, remembering his trip there last year (see 14.08.1998, below).

Choosing it as his the book of the year, the poet and editor Alan Ross wrote: ‘this is an exhilarating book of photo-montages, mainly on the subject of architecture, but with dazzling juxtaposed images using postcards, stamps, pin-ups, aeroplanes, sailors and footballers.’ This was in the refreshingly straightforward magazine The Oldie (something like the old Punch): maybe an appropriate forum in the year of David Wild’s sixtieth birthday.

Following the publication of his book, David Wild has been invited to deliver a plenary lecture at a conference on ‘Modern architecture: an incomplete project’, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA, 9–11 October 1998.