In a large room, on the third floor of an old woollen mill in the South West of England, nine architects spend most of their working lives, designing buildings and overseeing their construction. Asked where these come from, architects admit a kind of ignorance: 'Total magic!' as one puts it, 'Something comes from nothing!' Focusing on the everyday lives of architects, the book explores how buildings are assembled through an intimate and elusive choreography of people, materials, places, tools and ideas. Through these interactions, it asks and answers some questions of wider interest: What is the relationship between a working and a personal life? What is creativity? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? What does it mean to claim to know with authority? Most basically but most fundamentally the book is concerned with the question of what it is like to be an architect, and what lessons others might learn from the example their experience provides. Amongst other things, these have to do with the nature of expert knowledge, design, creativity and the central but less celebrated arts of administration.