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Early morning in the desert. I’m standing in a Tai Chi circle, surrounded by juniper and oleander trees, a ring of folding chairs and a gong set up in the sandy clearing. We’re standing atop a reputed energy vortex, one of 18 swirling hotspots at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center, some two hours east of Los Angeles. Supposedly, the vortices magnify one’s spiritual sensations and can help induce “an internal ecstatic experience,” according to the center’s website. I can use some internal ecstasy in my life. Which is why I’ve come to this spiritual Xanadu to dabble in something called Mentalphysics, an obscure kind of superyoga founded nearly a century ago.
Forget the current obsession with mindfulness. According to its founder, an eccentric Englishman named Edwin J. Dingle, Mentalphysics unlocks a mystical portal into self-mastery: the ability, he wrote, to “advance evolutionarily in Mind, Body, and Spirit” and “to live as long as I desire, to achieve whatever I wish.” Do you aspire to bend the forces of the universe in your favor? Gain the youthful appearance of someone two decades younger? Become clairvoyant? Adherents of the practice speak of gaining these very powers. I know, it sounds like a late night infomercial, the host half-baked. But for reasons that will soon become clear, I have come as a humble supplicant, without preconceptions, to see where the practice might take me.
Hannah Neumann, a German-born Mentalphysics reverend, strikes the gong, and we begin cycling through the eight main breathing exercises, with names like revitalizing, perfection, and grand rejuvenation. We’re inhaling prana, the all-important life force. Or, as Neumann puts it: “We’re bringing prana to every cell of our body.” Each of the eight breaths requires a corresponding movement—rotating the arms, bending at the waist, tilting the head back, all with an emphasis on keeping the spine straight, the buttocks tense, and the breathing deep, from down in the diaphragm. If there were a Zen Olympics, it would look something like this.
I expected to feel self-conscious—a suburban dad crashing some ceremony of the occult—but I find myself lost in the rhythm. Together we chant: I thank thee God for the breath of my life. Then one of the eight exercises. And then a relaxation mantra recited by Neumann: How happy I feel! I feel happy all over, particularly in my beautiful face. My face is bathed in smiles… The sun rises above the trees, the sweat beads on our foreheads. We finish by meditating. Neumann chants Om. Have I had “an internal ecstatic experience”? Not exactly. But I feel uplifted, buoyant, like I’ve inhaled a microdose of laughing gas at the dentist.
Like so many others, I’ve come to Joshua Tree on a spiritual quest, though in search of what exactly I can’t yet say. Unlike so many others, I have no plans to drop acid or drink Ayahuasca in the hopes of communing with the spirit of my dead mother. Instead, sans hallucinogens, I’ve pinned my hopes for Enlightenment on Dingle. A journalist-turned-mystic, he rechristened himself as Ding Le Mei, preached about the ancient spiritual secrets he had uncovered in Tibet, and founded Mentalphysics in 1927 as a combination of meditation, mantras, and pranayama, or breathing exercises—all in the pursuit of the “scientific principles of self-mastery.” “Primarily our purpose is not to inculcate certain religious beliefs,” he wrote, “but to teach you the methods of mysticism, the way to learn that which cannot be explained in words—HOW to seek, HOW to find.”
When Dingle ventured out to present-day Joshua Tree in 1941, he reported that a light emanated from the heavens as a voice instructed him to build a city: The desert will bloom like a rose. He approached Frank Lloyd Wright, who delegated the project to his eldest son, Lloyd Wright. The Institute of Mentalphysics took shape; his followers came. By the time of his death, in 1972, Dingle had amassed more than 214,000 of them, according to his Los Angeles Times obituary—a number that undoubtedly included the respondents to his newspaper ads (For the millions of people who today are adrift without landmarks in a universe lacking absolute truths … we have prepared an important booklet, THE ART OF TRUE LIVING). One of his acolytes started an offshoot in Mumbai, India, but here in the U.S., without its charismatic founder, Mentalphysics has slowly faded, mostly confined to an aging group of practitioners around the Joshua Tree Retreat Center, as the Institute is now called.
I didn’t expect much, to be honest. Some woo-woo whimsy, perhaps. But then strange things began transpiring.
How did I, a buttoned-up East Coast type, end up embarking on this bizarre journey? Even now it feels like one of those mystifying plot twists from an episode of Lost. I first heard about the Institute more than 15 years ago, when an architecture tour guide in Palm Springs tipped me off. It sounded vaguely cultish—some zany initiative plucked from the annals of obscure California history. Initially, I was drawn to the architecture: The campus is the largest collection of buildings designed by Lloyd Wright, a gifted architect in his own right. Then, about a year ago, I learned that the celebrated L.A. designer Brad Dunning—the creative force behind Tom Ford’s house—was renovating some bungalows at the site and turning them into a hotel.
I finally made plans to go. As I started reading about Dingle, his story unfolded like a fable, like a long-lost Hermann Hesse novel. As a journalist, he had walked across China starting in 1909, publishing an influential atlas and book, Across China on Foot; he had reported on the Chinese Revolution from the inside. He was a member of the Royal Geographic Society in London, manager of The Straits Times newspaper in Singapore, a Red Cross worker in China. But nothing prepared me for My Life in Tibet, his account of spending nine months in a Tibetan monastery. He described witnessing fantastical things: an orange tree sprouting from his master’s hand; a holy man traveling over the earth at the speed of a pony’s gallop. If this sounds like a fever dream, Dingle himself was very much real. As I turned the pages of one of his books, there he was, his author’s photo. Wearing a dark suit coat and vest buttoned up to his tie, he stared back at me through his delicate wire-framed glasses. Underneath his photo appeared to be an original signature in black ink: Sincerely yours, Edwin Dingle.
Because this happened to coincide with the moment when my life began unraveling in unexpected ways, and because I’ve always been intrigued by meditation, I couldn’t help but think that some higher power had, in a serendipitous gesture, sent me a spiritual guide to lead me back from the abyss.
Just how bad was my descent into middle age? I was staggering into it with all the poise of a concussed quarterback. I had joined the Great Resignation in fall 2021, leaving my job at a design magazine and freelancing as I tried to refresh my career, which was a euphemism for contending with all the ways I had managed to dead-end my career. But it was more than that, really. For years I have been plagued by a low-grade anxiety that threatens to derail me at a moment’s notice—unease about an awkward interaction with a neighbor; fear that I’ve made a mess of a story I’m editing; worry about our gutters clogging. In a way, my anxiety was a sign of progress, the only leftover symptom from a profound depression I had endured in my 30s—one that I had somehow managed to claw myself out from under. What remained, however, was an overriding feeling of being stuck, of life’s possibilities vanishing before me, like flyover country in Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover. If resignation is a daily suicide, as Balzac said, I was flat-lining my way through middle age.
But nothing had prepared me for last January, when on a bright Sunday morning, a day after a Nor’easter had dropped almost a foot of snow outside the window of her hospital room, I had held my mother’s hand as she was taken off life support. She was gone almost immediately. I had largely experienced death as an abstract event, observed through the veiled lens of a funeral home, but this was something different, shocking in its intimacy. My mother’s death was unexpected: She was 82, but a young, independent 82, and I figured she had years, if not a decade, left. Our relationship had devolved in the final stages of her life, and I was not only grieving her loss but the loss of what had been. In the months that followed, I had a nervous, manic energy that I couldn’t shake. I found myself scrolling mindlessly through my phone, having no memory of why I had picked it up or what I had seen. My anxiety lurked ever more prominently. The victim of this cataclysmic event, my brain, had apparently seized up, like a Prius pumped full of diesel. What I needed was a spiritual jumpstart.
Enter the retreat center. Ever since Dingle’s death, spiritual leaders of every persuasion (and their acolytes) have flocked here, among them Richard Alpert, the psychedelic researcher who transformed himself into the seminal yoga guru Ram Dass, and the Buddhist monk-turned-psychologist Jack Kornfield. Art Kunkel, founder of the Los Angeles Free Press, a pioneering voice of the ’60s counterculture, lived his final years at the center, practicing alchemy, teaching meditation, and chasing the secrets to immortality.
But my most immediate inspiration came by way of Michael Crichton, a spiritual neophyte like myself when, in 1982, he attended a conference at the Institute organized by a Los Angeles physician and healer. As he recounts in his memoir Travels, Crichton spent a not inconsiderable amount of time during his two-week stay talking to a cactus (by his account, the cactus talked back). Eight months later, Crichton wrote, “I had changed my relationships, my residence, my work, my diet, my habits, my interests, my exercise, my goals—in fact, just about everything in my life that could be changed.” Crichton didn’t reveal much about these changes, other than to acknowledge the death of his Big Mac habit, but it was clear that he had transformed his life. Was it so crazy to think I could transform my own?
For a place with such mystical import, the retreat center is surprisingly easy to find, the towering spire of the sanctuary rising above Twenty-Nine Palms highway less than two miles from a big-box hellscape anchored by a Walmart. But then you step onto the site and everything else begins to fade. The landscape, like much of the surrounding desert, is serene and hardscrabble, with a haunting beauty that draws you inward.
The architecture only enhances the mystique. The ridge cottages, the caravansary, the café—the Lloyd Wright buildings are low-slung and of the desert, with rooflines that cast beguiling shadows. Because the retreat center, a nonprofit with limited means, hasn’t always managed to fund the upkeep, the site resembles a mid-century Pompeii, a time capsule of Dingle’s unfettered ambition. He thought his city would serve as the blueprint for more communities, all predicated on the principles of “Truth and Beauty and Fair-Play and Love.” But at some point mystic and architect had a falling out. A builder named O.K. Earl Jr. completed a scaled-down version of the original plan, including the bungalows, which date to 1961 and were intended for Mentalphysics practitioners.
Enter Dunning, whose renovation has them shining all glossy and new, like something out of Palm Springs. Homestead Modern, a high-end hospitality company in the desert, funded the project and signed a lease with the center. I checked into a corner studio with sliding glass doors that open onto a patio and a large expanse of Joshua Tree-lined desert, an ideal spot for my daily pranayama regiment.
By the time I arrived, I was already five days into the 26-week-long Mentalphysics initiate course (cost: $75), which includes weekly lessons with Neumann, although I had decided to fly solo. The pranayama, meditation, and spiritual affirmations comprise the daily touchstones of the practice, along with a periodic 10-day cleansing and fasting regiment. Dingle’s breakfast concoction of orange juice, olive oil, honey, and the yolk of one egg? Not a chance. But the rest was doable and even inviting, with an emphasis on raw foods: lemon water, tomato juice, fruit, salads, and vegetable soup. No meat (do your research, he implored presciently) and limit your caffeine, which for me meant no morning cortado—the equivalent of asking a priest to forgo his daily communion. Still, I was game, and even though Dingle made no stipulations about alcohol, I decided that going dry seemed in keeping with the prevailing spirit.
Delving into Dingle’s teachings felt, at times, like attempting to wrestle air into submission, his writing so breezy, so elusive, it practically levitated off the page. But if this was a spiritual bridge to nowhere, I found much to recommend it. In some ways Mentalphysics represents a precursor to the prosperity gospel: Aspire to great riches, a lucrative career as a Hollywood producer or tech guru? Embrace it: No vows of poverty here. To that end, Dingle welcomed you to develop your own affirmations to recite during meditation. I found his nakedly optimistic worldview alluring, plucked from an era when post-war California was booming, when Eastern religious practices and self-betterment philosophies and utopian colonies sprouted here like a desert superbloom. For much of recent memory, my mantra, the prevailing internal soundtrack of my life, had been a depressing one-two: I am not good enough. I will never be good enough. Now I found unexpected comfort in making statements of ambition, of embracing the possibility that the universe could be a beneficent force in my life, if only I opened myself up to it.
Flipping through radio stations as I was driving through the desert one day, I caught a Christian minister giving a dispiriting sermon on the nature of free will: Don’t bother too much with diet and exercise; God knows the day you’ll die from the moment you’re born. As I crunched my raw almonds and gulped my ionized water, I grasped Dingle’s appeal—you can live as long as you want!—for California transplants who had tired of hearing some version of hellfire and damnation every Sunday back in Peoria.
According to Victoria GeVoian, a former director of the retreat center, the Mentalphysics practitioners she met during her tenure were like “little angels”: “They were in their 80s and 90s, but they had this strength in their hands. They had this smooth, glass-like skin, and their eyes would twinkle, full of life.” GeVoian began practicing herself and is now writing a book about the scientific underpinnings of the eight breathing exercises. “Most of the time when you’re doing meditation, you have a sense of euphoria, but there’s no grounding,” she told me. Mentalphysics is different: “Not only is it meditative, you also feel very grounded and present, a sense of awareness, a deep awareness to the presence of life itself.”
Andre Le Fernier, 80, a retired high school psychologist in Montreal, might be the last living practitioner to have studied under Dingle himself. He discovered Mentalphysics upon seeing an ad in Popular Mechanics, and after finishing high school, spent five years in L.A. and Joshua Tree. “You could see that he was a master, in the Buddhist sense,” Le Fernier told me about his mentor, explaining that he’d discovered unexpected benefits to the practice. “You become more clairvoyant. Which is not magic, it’s just that a person under stress doesn’t see what’s going on around them, but a person that’s calm, they notice all kinds of things, and if you notice things, you can foresee things.”
Perhaps it was the pranayama, but I, too, had begun to notice things. Things I had in common with Lloyd Wright, for instance. Unlike me, Lloyd had Hollywood connections, having built the original Hollywood Bowl and movie sets for Paramount, and he was a magnificent artist and renderer: “the poet of architecture,” as the writer Anaïs Nin once described him. But as I learned about his relationship with his legendary father, who had groomed his son to follow in his footsteps even as his towering self-regard made him all but impossible to please—well, I began to feel a certain kinship with Lloyd.
“You are absolutely the worst-mannered young man I know,” the elder Wright once wrote to his son. “You will promise and not keep it. You will buy when you can’t pay. You will attempt anything and blame failure on others … Your sense of time is loose. Your grasp of your work is loose. Your sense of justice is loose.”
In these dispatches I recognized much of what my mother had directed at me in our final years together. I was almost always a disappointment. I had squandered my education. Like Lloyd, I did not keep my promises. Only in our final year together, after months of therapy, did I come to realize that for her, this was a necessary defense. In the 1960s, she had left her home in Germany to work as a nurse in New York City—temporarily, she thought. But after meeting my father she had gotten married and settled down, and her father (my grandfather) had cut off all contact for a decade, sending back every letter of hers unopened. They had reconciled in his final years, but imagine the grief, the suffering, she had endured.
And then, a couple of decades later, when she and my father decided to split, it was too much to bear. The world no longer felt like a safe place. She viewed everyone with a suspicion that must have felt necessary—even her own son, because surely I, too, would betray her. More than ever she needed me, but couldn’t bear the intimacy. A rift opened between us, one we were incapable of mending.
Is it any surprise that Lloyd “could be devastating in his anger,” as Eric Lloyd Wright, Lloyd’s 93-year-old son, wrote in a 1998 monograph of his father’s buildings? And that “those closest to him suffered his anger most”? But Lloyd had also found an outlet in his studio, according to Hannah Wear, an architect who worked for Eric. “He was such a down dude, angry and repressed,” she told me. But his designs—they were alive with emotion. “They’re like party buildings: laughing and explosive and exuberant.” To walk around the retreat center is to see Lloyd’s unrestrained artistic ambition, his yearning writ large.
I thought also of Dingle’s early trauma: His mother died giving birth to him, and he was orphaned at 9 and raised by a grandmother. Suffering from malaria and a host of other ills during his journey across China, he had thought about suicide, what he would later call “the worst of all human foolishness.” In 1959, he endured more heartbreak, when his son Richard, whom he was grooming as his successor, died of legionnaire’s disease. Dingle built a chapel-memorial at the Institute, where he communed with his dead son. With its folded zig-zag roof, minimalist midcentury vibe, and trickling fountain in an outdoor courtyard, the chapel remains an oasis within an oasis.
From that original trauma was born a desire to escape, to make something of himself: As a child Dingle reportedly spent hours poring over maps of Asia, having “spells” where he would transport himself on imaginary journeys. That desire overtook him more than once; reality and myth blurred together. An Australia-based travel writer who recently re-created Dingle’s walk across China discovered that he likely plagiarized parts of another writer’s account. A Polish scholar has questioned if he ever set foot in Tibet. Even more troubling: the introduction that accompanies My Life in Tibet. Written in 1939 by a Mentalphysics member named Louis M. Grafe, the introduction traces the history of a “noble and superior” Indo-European or Aryan race responsible for developing the ancient spiritual wisdom in India that informed Mentalphysics—a race that was dedicated to keeping its “white blood pure.” But Dingle himself appeared to employ an open tent policy at the Institute, and in Across China on Foot, his conclusion is not that of a bigot: “The Chinese is not inferior, and the longer I live with him the more numerous become the lessons which he teaches me.”
We’re left with an enigmatic figure, and a question of faith. Countless disciples believe, and that belief has been a guiding force in their lives. I too find myself captivated by Dingle’s reinvention, by his unassailable optimism that we can, with a little effort, a little pranayama, leave our burdens behind and start anew.
Nighttime. I’m lying face-up on the patio of my studio, eyes closed, hands resting on white quartz crystals, as my spiritual healer, Neysa Griffith, circles my prone body, shaking egg-shaped rattles and chanting words that I can hear but can’t quite process in my meditative state. A purveyor of the ancient art of energy medicine, Griffith is all soothing vibes, with talk of soul circles and a snake shedding its skin. She arrived bearing gifts: chai, drunk in small stone cups, and a mesa, a pillow-like bundle that contains a healing mixture of rocks and herbs.
Together we created a zone of sacred space, shaking the rattles in all four directions to honor the hummingbird, jaguar, eagle, and serpent—the four animals of a medicine wheel, an ancient Native American symbol of healing. And then, after some preliminary breathwork, my hands anointed with golden Frankincense, I started to meditate. At home, my attempts usually lasted but a few minutes before my restless brain tapped out and begged for an Instagram-initiated dopamine hit. But now, with Griffith’s help, I find myself transported to another realm—a kind of mystical half-house between every-day consciousness and some sort of deeper communion with my soul. Warm vibrations emanate up my legs and down my arms—she’s administering a tuning fork around my chakras, elevating me to a new harmonic state.
I know nothing about my chakras, have never once thought to consider whether they are balanced. And in this moment, I don’t make any transcendent leaps, hear voices from beyond, enjoy some mind-altering trip. But after an hour, when my middle-aged bladder intervenes and breaks my trance-like state, I feel a preternatural state of calm. The next day the mundane will intrude in the form of calls to HVAC companies to deal with a faulty A/C unit back home, but not even that can kill my Zen-like buzz. I can feel my nervous system downshifting to a more sustainable gear.
I’ve come to understand how this place can draw you in deep, send you down spiritual rabbit holes that spiral into the great beyond. Art Kunkin spent his final decades living in a small steel-clad house on the old farm at the center, surrounded by thousands of books about alchemy, medical research, and spirituality. An anti-war and Civil Rights advocate, Kunkin had captured the voice of the counterculture and the dispossessed in his newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press, before he had turned to a life of spiritual seeking, and here he’d embarked on a quest of his own: for eternal life, or at least something close to it.
Every Tuesday night in the early aughts, he held a meditation class at his house, sessions that Ted Quinn, a Joshua Tree–based musician and one of Kunkin’s friends and students, remembers well. You never knew what Kunkin had in store: Tibetan-based pranayama, à la Dingle; brain-activation techniques. “He was interested in what that quiet mind could do to help the world,” Quinn tells me. “That was his end goal in teaching. The reason he wanted to live to be 200 is that the longer you’re around, the more wisdom you can acquire, and the more you can help the world.”
And how does one achieve near-immortality? By eating apples irradiated with uranium ore, apparently. Maybe the experiment helped Kunkin extend his life—he died in 2019, age 91—but it had other, more obvious benefits, according to Quinn. “We called him Art the hair farmer,” he told me. “Overnight he had this incredible head of hair.”
I’m sitting with Quinn late one afternoon in the amethyst portal, a spiky turquoise-colored plywood structure, once installed at Burning Man, that’s part of the center’s sculpture garden. A soulful character, Quinn has an enviable mane himself—a swooping wave of gray—and you can see him get a little distant as he remembers his meditation sessions with Kunkin: “It was a rough period for me. My closest friend here was in the last year of his life. He had cancer. Going to Art’s class helped me get through that period.”
According to Eastern death practices that Quinn and his friend had uncovered, we should attempt to expire with our feet on the ground, because that way the soul knows to exit up through the head, embarking on its journey to the afterlife. As Quinn waited by his deathbed, in a moment of unexpected poignancy, his friend suddenly sat up, planted his feet, and passed on.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a renowned guide for the journey into the afterlife, describes how the soul passes through a kind of purgatory, or bardo, on its way to reincarnation. After a difficult run during the pandemic, the retreat center is itself in a state of bardo, poised for its own rebirth. The site was recently listed in the National Register of Historic Places, which will confer some degree of protection on the architecture here, and could open avenues for grant money, however modest, to restore it. In 2019, pre-Covid, Hannah Wear and her partner Kevin Parkhurst, of Topanga, California–based Design Integration Group, had presented the center’s board with a master plan to rehabilitate the campus, including transitioning to solar power. “You can’t not do these things, or we’re going to lose the whole kit,” Wear told me. “If we can get the Ding Le Mei house singing they could celebrate him, and that could be a big draw.”
Give Mentalphysics a contemporary refresh, and you can imagine a new generation embracing the practice, whether it’s bungalow guests or other spiritual seekers. Frank Haggard, a Mentalphysics reverend, told me that Dingle himself had made a final prophecy: “Because of his passing, he said Mentalphysics would deteriorate, but that it would be like the Phoenix, rising back up. It will be greater than ever: That’s what we’re hoping for.”
As for me: After five days in the desert, I return home and resume my domestic rhythms—HVAC appointments, lawn mowing, loading the dishwasher. I continue my breathwork and meditation, slowly transition back to a normal diet, and wait for the euphoria, the newfound sense of calm, to dissipate. I’m six pounds lighter thanks to my cleanse, nearly at my racing weight when I was college distance runner, but I also feel lighter in spirit: I left something behind in the desert—or rather, some almost imperceptible shift had transpired, the way you might rearrange two words in the draft of a story and send it careening in an inspired new trajectory.
And what of those strange coincidences? They had continued to pile up during my trip, like a series of nods from some higher power. I had learned that Griffith, like me, was an only child who spent years navigating a difficult relationship, not with her mother but with her father. Reverend Neumann had emigrated from Germany in the early 1970s, a few years after my mother, and her clipped demeanor had stirred quick remembrances. Frank Lloyd Wright had died of a bowel obstruction, just like my mom—a macabre bit of trivia relevant to no one but me.
And then, a heart-stopping crescendo: While chatting with Parkhurst and Wear in their Topanga studio, I got my first extended close-up look at Wear and realized that, with her brown eyes and prominent cheekbones, she was my mom’s doppelgänger—a realization that hit like a thunderclap to my soul. If you were to tell me this was all just a coincidence, I would believe you. And yet, in the days after my return, a state of profound peace descended over me: I knew that she was out there somewhere, that all was forgiven.
According to the late Buddhist Lama Anagarika Govinda, who wrote an introduction to a 1957 translation, The Tibetan Book of the Dead is intended as much for the living as for the dying: “It is one of the oldest and most universal practices for the initiate to go through the experience of death before he can be spiritually reborn,” he wrote. “Symbolically, he must die to his past, and to his old ego…”
Had I been reborn? I had not remotely achieved Nirvana or grasped the unreality of existence, a necessary step in the Buddhist journey to enlightenment; I am but a rank amateur to Dingle’s ascended master. But in a way I was reborn: Thanks to some combination of the pranayama, the affirmations, the tuning fork, and the vortices, I had glimpsed the aura emanating from some higher power in the desert. I could make all manner of claims: how I rediscovered some long-lost version of myself; how all the burdens I had been carrying fell to the wayside; how I underwent a rewiring of my synapses. But I tend to be skeptical of epiphanies, so all I can say is this: Six months later, the old patterns—the old downtrodden mantras—have yet to return.
One night at the Institute I had walked out into the desert behind the bungalows and thought of all the ambition that gave rise to this place: Dingle attempting to create a model city that would inspire followers the world over; Lloyd Wright bringing his dramatic flair to the tabula rasa of the desert; Kunkin questing for immortality—all of them united in their focus on some more perfect future, one predicated on love, hope, and joy. Maybe now, more than ever, we can all use a spiritual jumpstart, “a nature-spirit connection to help us evolve,” as Wear puts it. Maybe now, more than ever, as one local described the center and its energy vortexes, we need “a giant radio antennae, beaming peace and love into the world.”
Eric Wills is a former senior editor at Architect magazine whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Smithsonian, and GQ.
