I think this is my 9th-grade "graduation" photo; if so, that makes it 1967

Mom drives us across country in her new Buick Special; we stay in San Francisco and see Janis Joplin, Jeff Beck, Sly Stone, and others at the Fillmore West, where I pick up this classic poster, July 1968.

On the way back, we stop at the Grand Canyon, July 1968

I fly to London with two friends in the summer of 1969; we take the train-ferry to Paris (where this photo is taken), buy mopeds in Dijon, and ride about 1500 kilometers throughout France (staying in youth hostels), then up into Belgium, and finally to Amsterdam, where we catch the return flight back home about one month later.

I write a draft application essay for Cornell's Department of Architecture, probably around Dec. 1969.

As layout editor for the New Rochelle High School student newspaper (The Huguenot Herald), I create this collage of school graffiti under the direction of editor Gloria Borger, Feb. 1970.

I draw this self-portrait in June 1970

My high school yearbook entry, 1970

I enter the professional 5-year architecture program at Cornell University in 1970; this is me in the second semester of my freshman year, 1971.

I don't do very well in the 2nd-year design studio at Cornell, receiving a C-, which triggers this probation letter from legendary Chair O.M. Ungers in Dec., 1971.

I get a summer job with New Rochelle, NY Architect Kaneji Domoto, and make this drawing in Aug. 1972. Domoto studied with Frank Lloyd Wright, and designed the house my father built (and that we lived in beginning in 1964).

Here I'm dressing up for older brother's wedding, Sept. 1973

I never buy into the Cornell Corbu-inflected modernist design ethos, and produce this conventional apartment plan for a 4th-year design studio, May 1974 (I still recall Prof. Werner Seligmann's diatribe about how horizontal strip windows have been proven by science to be superior to double-hungs).

Most of my college memories have the war in Vietnam as a backdrop (I have a low "draft number" and would be drafted to fight in the war if I leave college); I take this photo at the intersection of College Ave. and Dryden Rd. in Collegetown, Ithaca, NY, Sept. 1974

This is me in my apartment on College Avenue, Ithaca, NY, circa 1974 (photo by M. Bertomen)

All my non-architecture electives at Cornell are in structural engineering; I take this photo of Prof. Arthur Nilson explaining something about concrete in Hollister Hall,1974

Still in my apartment on College Avenue, Ithaca, NY, pretending to draft (with both hands. no less) circa Nov. 1974