Cameron Village Regional Library will host a presentation and book-signing event for award-winning architect Frank Harmon, FAIA, on Wednesday, April 10, at 6 p.m., as he shares his new bookNative Places: Drawing as a Way to See.

Quail Ridge Books will provide and sell copies of Harmon’s book. The event is free and open to the public.

Published by ORO Editions, Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See is a collection of 64 of Harmon’s watercolor sketches paired with brief essays he’s written about architecture, nature, and everyday objects and places that first appeared on his popular online journal NativePlaces.org. The sketches convey the delight he finds in ordinary places. The short essays, inspired by the sketches, offer his fresh interpretations of what most people take for granted.

Past NC Poet Laureate Fred Chappell describes Harmon’s book as “a sketch book, a memoir, travel journal, aesthetic experiment, a collection of small familiar essays, and maybe in some respects even a manifesto,” adding, ““Native Places…has afforded me happy pleasures, different from any that I have before derived from a book.”

Harmon’s mission for Native Places is “to transform the way we see,” he says, and to promote his belief that hand drawing offers “an opportunity to develop a natural grace in the way we view the world and take part in it.”

Mission accomplished, according to Mike Welton, the architecture critic for the Raleigh News & Observer, who suggests Harmon’s book is “destined to change how we see this world.”