The Globe and Mail

A lot of writing about houses, architecture and cities pretends it's all about bricks and mortar. We get paragraph-by-paragraph walk-throughs, elaborate descriptions of interiors, and the low-down on the latest features, but too often, the human story of the shaping of where we live gets lost along the way. Yes, the physical facts are important in understanding our built environment, but in the end it is people who shape our dwellings.