The city of Los Angeles is criticized for many things, among them having no center. Over 50 years ago Ray Bradbury began writing down his remedies for that problem. Today his influence apparent in the Glendale Galleria, Century City and the redesign of key parts of Hollywood.

Bradbury biographer Sam Weller knows how important that legacy was to the author, who tried to summarize it in an essay they reworked many times in his final years though never finished.

Weller published that work in Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, and has allowed it to be excerpted as “The Pomegranate Architect” in The Paris Review.

As I look back over the last fifty years of my work in architecture, I can’t help but think about the time I visited the Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago in 1933. I was twelve, and as I wandered about that incredible city they had constructed, I fell in love with the future. And after I left the fair, I went home to the small Illinois town where I lived and in the backyard of my parents’ home, I constructed buildings out of paper and cardboard, not knowing that thirty years forward, in my own future, I would start my architectural work helping to build another World’s Fair, the 1964 New York World’s Fair, thus beginning my career as the world’s only accidental architect.