Here are the opening lines of Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative.

In 1926 an Irish designer named Eileen Gray, who’d created lots of gorgeous, strange furniture but scarcely a house, began designing a shiplike villa on the south coast of France that would drive the famed architect Le Courbusier wild. Corbu had just announced that a house was “a machine to live in,” but Gray thought, No: a house is a person’s shell, a skin, and should respond to how she lives.

Yes to the resounding no . . . to being defined sometimes by the creativity and scale of our disagreements.