Yearning for a Broad Place: An Architect’s Odyssey from Baltimore Blues to Cape Cod Bays, from Sorcerer’s Apprentice to Pilgrim

EVERYONE HAS SOME ＂BROAD PLACE＂ of FREEDOM THEY YEARN TO ESCAPE TO, if only in daydreams. The author tells how Cape Cod was such a place for him growing up in the 1950s, when not every bay was lined with mansions and the woods and marshes still had a touch of wildness to them. What the author was escaping is only hinted at first, but crescendos to a near-madness of intellectual hubris. His salvation story is laced with observations on architecture and landscape, struggles between Tradition and Modernity, and many sharp ＂edges＂ of ＂progress＂ his life has spanned. You’ll meet his Uncle Frank, a gifted designer of custom automobile bodies struggling for his art in an increasingly mass-production age. He engages with another uncle, a Christian Scientist, over biblical truth. Another chapter honors the author’s late friend, Rev. Paul Anderson, who turned down a fashionable call, to preach in less glamorous Fall River-the ＂least Bible-minded＂ city in America-and the high price he paid for faithfulness. Besides evocations of Cape Cod and Boston, anyone who likes Melville’s Moby-Dick (a fitting touchstone for the author’s observations) and the novels of Charles Dickens will find things to enjoy along the way. Emil Heller Henning III was born and raised between Boston, Mass. and Baltimore, Md. He earned a master’s degree in architecture, served three years in the Army Corps of Engineers, and has worked for architects in the Carolinas, starting his own practice in 2002. He became a Christian in 1977 (as told herein) and is an elder at his church. He wrote a book about Ezekiel’s Temple Vision (Xulon Press, 2013) and has a second book on it in preparation (2023).