To paraphrase Gaston Bachelard, 
A [sketch] is a bud attempting to become a twig. 
How can one not dream while [drawing]? It is the pen that dreams. 
The blank page gives the right to dream.
 
houses_towers_cities is a book of architectural speculations inspired by words. The words of writers Calvino, Bachelard, Lightman, Pessoa, Benjamin Franklin, Nietzsche, Dante Alighieri, Plato, Cyrano de Bergerac, and George Herman resonate in the mind’s eye, creating the accompanying sketches and illustrations. The illustrations flow from a dreaming fountain pen and various media, including computer graphics. 
 
These are dreams of cities in a state of reverse entropy, dreams of a city’s scents. These are industrial cities and pastoral cities, either miniature or tall, youthful or aging. Cities to escape aging. As Calvino wrote: The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.
 
These are houses in motion, word houses that fly, ski, sail across the moon, or change with the weather. Towers embedded in Sovich’s memories, the towers of steel mills and blast furnaces that dominated his hometown. At times the drawings generate their own stories. Some have been posted on Sovich’s blog.  
 
Olinda, a poem written for this book by Emma Sovich, breathes life into a city of her imagination. Baltimore Bouquet is an essay, by Randy Sovich, on the odiferousness of a Baltimore past.