It was a long commute that summer of 1973: onto the Baltimore Beltway, then Interstate 95, then the Washington Beltway, then into Dupont Circle, and finally the tedious search for free on-street parking. And after 5:00 P.M. I retraced the route in the reverse direction, every day, five days a week. At work, I scrutinized the blueprints of a Long Island hospital to unravel the layout of departments (or were they archduchies?) spread through a maze of interconnected buildings. Sometimes a department extended up through several levels of one building, sometimes it extended across one level in several buildings, and sometimes both. At home, relaxation was afforded by a curious little book of geometrical drawings. And one day, as the symmetries in the dissection of a 10-pointed star and two 5-pointed stars were reflected and refracted in a mind game of what-if, the stars first replicated, then rotated, then stacked as levels of a building, then merged into volumes worthy of those medical potentates.