One of the best tricks played by architects, designers and builders in history has been to place their own secret messages, inside-joke winks, metaphorical projections or expressions of their own likenesses into the result of their efforts.

One example, and a favorite of mine, is how Anton Pilgram, the lead architect of one of the phases of Saint Stephen’s Cathedral (Stephansdom) in Vienna placed himself looking out of a window underneath an ornately-carved cancle (Kanzel).

But my all-time favorite happened in the modern era, in an inner-city Atlanta neighborhood which had freshly shaken off a few decades of urban blight and emerged as a vibrant and valuable neighborhood in which old hippy types and urban pioneers who had paid $40,000 for homes in the 70s were now sitting on $500,000 piles of equity.

One such scenario played out on my street. A solid, squat bungalow with a full basement had been divided into a rooming house at one stage and was now occupied by a couple and their two young children. The owner was a semi-pro architect. He’d trained in architecture and started down that path, but gone into something else to make money, but always retained his dream of designing. Fortunately for him, he was able to finally obtain the resources necessary to give his own home a very high-end, deluxe renovation designed by the best architect he could think of.

He drew up the plans, hired the best high end renovation firm in the city (”$100 per square foot?” they asked. “Try twice that before fixtures”). The architect for the firm looked the plans by the homeowner over to ensure they conformed to code and the like, and after hashing everything out, my buddy David and a crew of several more were swinging the hammers and thrashing about with the reciprocating saws.

It was July in Georgia: the hottest July on record. Sweat was part of every motion. The homeowner was there every day for hours on end, popping in unexpectedly and demanding explanation of the hows and whys as well as requiring that all music be turned off while he was there due to “headaches.” But he was fun in some ways, too. He’d bring beer. He was trying. He was, what the Germans might call, a “Streber”—a striver, the connotation being that he was trying, but not succeeding, at being one of the guys. It was a minor irritation contrasted with he heat. And the mosquitoes.

The plans, like so many in this area, called for blowing out the attic of the bungalow and adding a second story for a “master suite.” But this one was special. A spiral staircase would gently swaddle a thick, cylindrical spire covered in rich wood veneer. The spire, begun at the ground floor, would pierce through the second story and spear the roof of the home. A set of gabled windows near the peak of the roof would ensure that street traffic could see the virility and scope of this penetrating, hulking rod as its mammoth length skewered the entire house.

My friend David would laugh about this each evening as we sipped our after-work Budweiser tallboys around our dinner table.

“The man is obviously compensating for something,” he’d say. “I mean, think about it: he’s fucking his house.”

One day, David found himself straddling some beams about 20 feet off of the ground. He was there to fix some hangers that another carpenter had attached at too wide an interval for the homeowner. They were spaced at the required minimum of twelve inches, but the homeowner wanted eight. So David was re-hanging and re-spacing while exposed to direct sunlight, dizzying heights, a watchful homeowner, and a near-crippling hangover from a long night out in Little Five Points. Shirtless, and in cutoffs, his sweat was marking the clean wood below, and he noticed that on some of the original wood of a joist below, he could see clean, perfect script that looked a little old fashioned. It read “Hinson built this in 1917.”

David whipped out his carpenter’s pencil and scribbled a reply:

Dear Carpenters Of The Future,

Fuck You.

Love, 1995