Location: United States
Member Since:
Feb. 27, 2012
Susan Cory
Biography
I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts and work as a residential architect.
I grew up in New Jersey devouring mysteries. I loved seeing order restored
by ingenious sleuths. But the visual arts were my medium of expression. As
an Art major at Dartmouth, I imagined that designing buildings was just a
larger-scaled version of creating sculpture. I soon discovered that it was
far different from working on my own, paring down a big hunk of wood while
dressed in plaid shirts and living in an attic. In fact, at graduate school
at Harvard's G.S.D., I found a setting—insecurity and ego riding a particle
accelerator of Design Obsession—just ripe for murder. I couldn't understand
why there were no mysteries about architects and architecture students doing
each other in.
The mystery world is littered with sleuths who are cops, P.I.s, countless lawyers,
bookstore owners, caterers, ministers—every profession but my own. Aren't we
problem solvers? Don't we find ourselves deeply enmeshed in other people's lives?
Don't we passionately defend our beliefs? Clearly the architecture world has been
ignored as a mystery setting, and architects have been neglected as sleuths and,
yes, murderers.
So in I blundered, forgetting that I was a "Vizzie", not a "Verbie".
Several years were spent getting up to speed with, you know, the using-words-thing.
Conundrum is an ode to my profession and all the deviously clever
practitioners within it. The first ode. Iris Reid will get tossed into any number of
tight spots as the series progresses.
I grew up in New Jersey devouring mysteries. I loved seeing order restored
by ingenious sleuths. But the visual arts were my medium of expression. As
an Art major at Dartmouth, I imagined that designing buildings was just a
larger-scaled version of creating sculpture. I soon discovered that it was
far different from working on my own, paring down a big hunk of wood while
dressed in plaid shirts and living in an attic. In fact, at graduate school
at Harvard's G.S.D., I found a setting—insecurity and ego riding a particle
accelerator of Design Obsession—just ripe for murder. I couldn't understand
why there were no mysteries about architects and architecture students doing
each other in.
The mystery world is littered with sleuths who are cops, P.I.s, countless lawyers,
bookstore owners, caterers, ministers—every profession but my own. Aren't we
problem solvers? Don't we find ourselves deeply enmeshed in other people's lives?
Don't we passionately defend our beliefs? Clearly the architecture world has been
ignored as a mystery setting, and architects have been neglected as sleuths and,
yes, murderers.
So in I blundered, forgetting that I was a "Vizzie", not a "Verbie".
Several years were spent getting up to speed with, you know, the using-words-thing.
Conundrum is an ode to my profession and all the deviously clever
practitioners within it. The first ode. Iris Reid will get tossed into any number of
tight spots as the series progresses.