There’s no time when music meant as much to me as it did when I was in architecture school in Cambridge.  The endless stream of pop music pumped through my Walkman was as essential as oxygen.  Boston was a good music town.  There were small clubs, student radio stations, and stores selling secondhand records and tapes.  The Pixies and Tracy Chapman had made it big.  The day I packed up and left Cambridge, that is, the day my adulthood began, was the day Kurt Cobain died.  The boy behind the counter at the copy shop who was helping me with my resume that afternoon looked a lot like him, with the same stringy blond hair, clear blue eyes, and ghostly pallor.  Each time I spoke to him he fixed me with his stare and nodded slowly, as if to say “Yes, of course, but what’s it all for?”

Sometimes on weekends I walked all the way down Massachusetts Avenue to the Tower Records on Newbury Street in Boston to hunt for music.  The store filled the first two floors of an old warehouse building that had been converted to luxury condos by Frank Gehry, who added penthouses and canopies with signature flaring outriggers.  The building always seemed a bit overdressed for the surroundings, as if it had been flown in from SoHo.  As a high-minded student of architecture, I dismissed its deliriously over-scaled decorations – its hat and skirt – as empty gestures.  But seeing the building again last week, on a grey afternoon, it struck me as a perfect urban folly.  It still feels a bit too flashy for the surroundings, and the record store has been replaced by a discount appliance store.  But its kooky, soaring profile brightens the city, and brightens the day.