Who makes these, and how
How these are made
For forty years I built what other people drew. Now I draw for other people to finish.
The hand
I came up in the trade. Union carpenter, Local 44, building sets in Hollywood — Air Force One, The Flintstones. Work that had to be right the first time, because the camera was coming and the schedule never moved.
After that, twenty years running Studio Concepts: a 52,000 square foot design-build shop with CNC and waterjet and thirty-five people in it. Architects and designers handed us drawings. We turned them into things you could walk into.
The job never really changed. Read the drawing. Find what’s wrong with it. Build it right anyway.
A drawing isn’t decoration, it’s an instruction. Four decades of reading them teaches you what a real building looks like on paper — which lines carry load, which proportions are honest, and which details belong to a period and which have wandered in from somewhere else.
That is the only qualification I’m claiming. It happens to be the one that matters here.
The method
The illustrations in these books are made with AI. I don’t draw them.
That’s the plain fact, and I’d rather you read it here than find it in a review. It’s on the copyright page of every book and on every retail listing. Putting it on my own site, in my own words, seemed like the least I could do.
Here is what it actually means. The model has no idea what a building is. It has never held a framing square or stood inside a house. It will give a Victorian a set of Craftsman brackets, or draw a roof pitch that couldn’t shed water, and it will do it with complete confidence. It doesn’t know when it’s wrong. It can’t.
So the work isn’t the generating. The work is the rejecting.
I look at what comes out the way I looked at drawings on job sites for forty years, back when being wrong cost money and a week of somebody’s time. Wrong period detail. Wrong proportion. A porch that couldn’t carry its own roof. Most of what the machine makes doesn’t survive that look. What’s in the books is what did.
AI drawings are never perfectly accurate, and I won’t tell you otherwise. I catch what I can, with an eye that took four decades to build. Where something gets past me, I’d rather hear about it than not.
| Illustrations | AI-generated. Selected, rejected and corrected by hand. |
|---|---|
| Text and facts | Written and researched by me. |
| Direction and judgment | Mine. Every plate in the book is there because I kept it. |
| Where this is disclosed | Here, on the copyright page of every book, and on every retail listing. |
| The other book | It Doesn’t Go There isn’t a coloring book, but the same applies: AI was used for the cover and in the text, and the method is mine. |
The lines are machine-made. The judgment is mine. The color is yours — and that last part is the whole point of the object.
See what people have done with themNine books so far. Houses that shaped how people live, and the landmarks people cross the world to stand in front of.
— Eric Steele