Member garyvalentinehansen

Heavily weighted in favour of non-fiction, I have the questionable habit of marking significant texts in expectation that I may wish to refer back to them at future dates. My primary interests are focused upon philosophy, humanity, nature, reason, logic and, not-withstanding the above, idealism.

As a professional architect the natural extension of this interest has been to seek and commit to writing an understanding of the architecture of everything else. In so doing the author of 'It: The Architecture of Existence' (ISBN 9781857566680) has sometimes found himself confronted by what poets have described as the urgency to record a stream of fleeting thoughts, and the difficulty of keeping up with the flow.
Qualifications for writing a book of (some say) unclassifiable diversity arise in no small measure from the author's exposure to the conditions of others. Being drafted into boarding school on the shirttails of his siblings at the age of four (on the day that WWII started); representing England at the age of fifteen in an international children's camp in Luxembourg under the auspices of the then-fledgling UNESCO; attending the rigorous Outward Bound Sea School at sixteen; travelling around Europe alone shortly after the war when a hitchhiker was a conspicuous curiosity; witnessing Nikita Khrushchev's shoe-banging incident at the UN; vicarious revelations of the self that arise from exploring the wilderness, and travelling with his family to remote corners of the world in the interest of opening the mind – all contributed to a passion for understanding what 'it' was all about, and a compulsion to contribute positively to 'it'.