Hey, thanks for stopping by.
I’m Bryan. This site is where I write short posts about whatever has been occupying my brain lately. Sometimes that’s cities and architecture. Sometimes it’s photos from a walk. Sometimes a book, a piece of music, or a stray observation that felt worth writing down.
By profession I’m an urban planner. I spend a lot of time thinking about how places work and how they could work better. Transit, public space, architecture, and landscape design have a way of sneaking into how I see everything else.
Outside of work I mostly like making spending time with my young family, exploring, and making things. I have a lot of hobbies. Writing, photography, gardening, music, cooking experiments, tinkering with personal websites. The internet used to be full of small strange personal sites and I still believe that’s one of its best forms.
I grew up in the Great Lakes region and still miss it a lot. Not so much in the winter, but still. These days I live in the Pacific Northwest, where everything is greener, wetter, and quite a bit less cold. I like to joke that it took moving to a cloudy part of the country to cure my seasonal affective disorder Michigan winters had a hand in creating.
Part of the reason I keep a site like this is that the internet can feel pretty mean and exhausting these days. I wanted a small corner that feels more personal and more enjoyable to return to. I’m still working on it, but that’s the idea.
Interests
Some older fragments live in From an Earlier Web.