Compared with the land, everything else is an illusion. The cities are the startled thoughts of sleep.

Alfred Caldwell

My first encounter with Alfred Caldwell was in 1986, in the third year studio of Crown Hall, the school of architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). He sat next to me and asked me, ‘What did you come here to do?’ He meant here and now in this school of architecture, but his tone was deeply challenging in such a way that the question resonated much further.

Caldwell was a self-made man, practised in engineering, botany, construction, planning and landscape architecture; he had been responsible for planning a number of large parks in and around Chicago and had served Mies van der Rohe as his landscape architect. In addition he was a builder, an educator, a father and husband, a writer, poet and visionary — an unusual range of work, well summarized in Dennis Domer's Alfred Caldwell: The Life and Work of a Prairie School Landscape Architect. In our world, where the trend is for specialization and distinction in a narrow field, it seemed to me that an integrated mind capable of such breadth was really something special. Caldwell inspired me; at 83 he epitomized the closest thing to wisdom in a man.