While Away: An Architect's Travel Sketches

For Steve Ziger, FAIA, drawing has long been a way of understanding a place. Across five decades of travel, Steve filled sketchbooks with observations of buildings, streets, landscapes, and the details that give places their character. Those drawings come together in While Away: An Architect’s Travel Sketches, a new book from ORO Editions. Steve developed the book in collaboration with Baltimore-based author and journalist Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson.

Part memoir, part travel guide, part drawing manual, and part architectural history, While Away  features 240 ink, pencil, and watercolor sketches made over more than fifty years. The story brings Steve’s personal experiences together with observations of the built environment and the possibilities of human-made design. Moving from place to place and page to page, the book considers how drawing encourages us to be present, look closely, and better understand the places around us.

At The Ivy Bookshop on Thursday, October 8 at 6:00 pm, Steve will discuss While Away with Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson. Their conversation will explore the stories behind the sketches, the process of bringing the book together, and the role drawing has played throughout Steve’s life and work. A longtime writer on architecture, design, and cities, Dickinson is also the author of the critically acclaimed biography Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free.

Steve Ziger, FAIA, co-founded Ziger|Snead Architects in Baltimore in 1984. Over four decades, he worked closely with cultural, educational, nonprofit, and public institutions in Baltimore and beyond, helping establish Z|S as a nationally recognized design practice. He retired from active practice in 2025 and continues to serve as Partner Emeritus.

While Away: An Architect's Travel Sketches is available for preorder through the Ivy Bookshop here.