"I was in the room in Milan in September 1981."

Johnson was in Detroit, turning old warehouses into the city's first residential lofts, and the problem that kept presenting itself was what to put in them. His brother, an interior architect in Toronto, threw a copy of Casa Vogue on his desk — a Palladian villa filled with Bellini and Scarpa — and made the argument plainly: design tenets don't change across centuries, we just find other ways to do it. The next morning he told Johnson the Salone del Mobile was opening in Milan. Go and see if there's anything worth bringing back.

The fairgrounds were half empty. A security guard explained that Sottsass and these crazy kids had a show near the Duomo — totally pazza — and the streets around it were jammed. Johnson got out of the car, followed the directions, got lost, and found himself in an alley outside a tobacconist shop where a rather diminutive gentleman stood leaning against the wall, dressed entirely in black. He asked for directions to the Memphis show. The man pointed him toward the piazza — you will see all the beautiful people and Japanese TV — and introduced himself. Romeo Gigli, Milano. Johnson knew then. Things don't fall into place this perfectly unless something major is on the move.

The show was extraordinary in the specific way that only makes sense in retrospect — furniture that looked, in his mind, far more comfortable in Roy Lichtenstein's house than anywhere else, and yet he could see exactly what it was made of. Every serious current in contemporary art was present, absorbed, and pushed somewhere new. He started talking about the pieces in those terms with the man they called il professore, who walked him over to Sottsass and his future wife, the art critic Barbara Radice. When the conversation moved away from commodity and toward art objects, Sottsass told il professore: maybe this is the guy who should be selling it in America. By the next afternoon, he was their distributor.

Back at his hotel that evening, sketching, turning the night over, Urban Architecture was born. It was born at a particular moment — the beginning of the eighties, when everything felt possible — and Memphis was its reason for existing. Metropolitan Home named it the most important new dealer of architecture and design in America three years later. The design history establishment has since arrived at the same conclusion, slowly and on its own schedule.