I thought architecture would offer a mix of the artful and practical. It seemed cooler than some of the other options in the university. The lights were on in the architecture school when I got out of rehearsal at night. And I thought the men were handsome.

If you're steering a boat down a river, it's not something about which you can know that. You can only know how to do it. It's unfinished, it has no start-stop time, it's fluid. Practicality relies on indeterminate markers. It's just another kind of knowledge that's sexy, in a certain way. It's reactive, and often physical.

There are dangers surrounding innocuousness and consensus and habit. ISO organizes hundreds of people on technical committees who are, no doubt, trying to do their best. But the standards in some cases end up reinforcing violence and destruction thousands of miles away.