Atlanta has a Piano man they can call their own. His new masterpiece is Atlanta’s Woodruff Arts Center Campus, an expansion of the High Museum.

Renzo Piano comes from Genoa, Italy, and with him he thankfully brings a simple, yet sophisticated, idea of the city center, or Piazza.

“It’s a place where you feel well. You feel well first because you are in the middle of nature, because you are perfected…you are in the piazza.”

One of the most fascinating features of the High museum’s expansion is the roof, which provides illumination of the museum galleries with natural light by a special roof structure: 1,000 light “scoops” will capture northern light and filter it into the top-floor galleries. The shadow’s created at different times of the day reinforce the idea of art being fluid and never static. Each piece takes on a different look every second of every day, depending upon nature. Cool, huh?

Piano has this down-to-earth, wise air about him. He says things, with this captivating old world Italian accent, like “an architect must catch the little genius of the place. every place has a little genius, or many…” and “Architecture is not just the art of making buildings – it’s an art of telling stories.”

Please keep telling your story, Piano man.

I started getting The Sun about 6 months ago, most likely to make myself feel like I was around an interesting lot while in the safe confines of my cozy home, away from the rebel flags, W stickers, and church ladies that make up this southern enclave.

And it worked.

I love this magazine. Readers write, writers write, and it is all compellingly honest and straight forward and thought provoking and human. There are no ads. Sy Safransky, a New Yorker and journalist who now lives in Chapel Hill, NC, is the editor. In the back of his magazine, he provides Sy Safransky’s Notebook, which is actually quite like a blog, but started way before blogging. I’ll say it. Sy Safransky is and continues to be visionary. And brave. From his notebook:

When I was a newspaper reporter in the 1960’s, I frequently wrote about race and poverty. I interviewed scholars. I spent time in poor black neighborhoods talking with teachers and social workers and advocates for welfare rights. But I wasn’t black, and I wasn’t poor…So what can someone like me really know about being black and poor in America – about the way racism crushes a man like a monstrous wave, and poverty, like a razor wind, strips him to the bone?

Sy sold The Sun’s first copies for a quarter, peddling them on the streets of Chapel Hill. I am a sucker for that underdog scrappiness and all or nothing entrepreneurial spirit. And I definitely need to incorporate more of that into my own gamebook. With the scrappiness fully covered, all I need now are the cajones I seemed to have lost somewhere between Colorado and Chicago, in the breadth of my twenties.