Architects beget architects, so it seems. Eliel Saarinen had Eero Saarinen. Two of Frank Lloyd Wright’s sons, Lloyd and John, became architects. Walter Gropius’s father was an architect. And if not begotten, then nearly so: Maya Lin’s architect aunt, Lin Huiyin, helped conduct the first comprehensive study of architecture in China. Charles Eames was the nephew of architect William Eames. Henry Smith-Miller, of Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects, could (and perhaps should) write a book about his family of architects, which stretches back, with baroque twists and turns, to Silas Smith, an engineer and carpenter who left for Chile after the Civil War. Smith-Miller discovered this history after his architect father’s death. “My father was extremely progressive. He thought family history was totally unimportant,” he says.
While joining the family trade isn’t unique to architects, their proliferation raises the question: Is architecture in your blood? Lee Silver, a molecular biologist and professor at Princeton University, doubts we’ll ever be able to fully answer that. “It’s a very complicated network of genes that influence personality and behavior,” he says. “It’s clear to geneticists that there is no such unified entity as creativity or intelligence.” That said, there is a genetic context for talent, but it’s taboo to talk about it. “It’s part of the American educational system to say, 'You can do anything you want if you just try hard enough!’ It turns out, that’s not true,” says Silver. “Most people are pretty disappointed about what they accomplish in life.”
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