Maybe it is because he grew up in a bucolic part of Northern California.
Thomas Small, the architectural journalist and candidate for the City Council in Tuesday’s election, says today, “I love cities.”
Mr. Small’s eyes glow. His face brightens, as if the sun is just rising.
“I love the quality of life that is offered in the diversity and in the collisions that happen between people and communities,” he said.
At the peak of his architectural career, traveling the world, writing, analyzing and consulting in distant cities in need of re-shaping, Mr. Small brings a unique cache of skills to the City Council race.
Is his high-profile career a natural outcome of the way he was raised?
“I grew up kind of in the country in Northern California,” Mr. Small said. “My mother is from the Philippines. She emigrated when she was a teenager, and she became a nurse. She met my father who was kind of a small-town lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“I grew up in the mountains, on the peninsula of San Francisco. I went to college (Ivy League) on the East Coast, and then I got to France (as a student),” Mr. Small said.
“First, though, I took a year off between my sophomore and junior years. I went to Italy. I had been studying literature, and I wanted to learn Italian. I live in Florence and then in Rome.”
Mr. Small’s student travels ignited the spark that would illuminate his international career.
“I really came to appreciate how cities work,” he said, “and the excitement that they offer.”
(To be continued)
