You can hide paintings, avoid literature, and if you're ingenious avoid listening to music, but you cannot avoid architecture. It is the least perishable of the arts, and the most public. The Belly of an Architect is the story of a distinguished American architect with the unlikely name of Stourley Kracklite, who goes to Rome to put on an exhibition in memory of his hero, an eighteenth century visionary French architect. Kracklite forgets the present to honor the past, but at what cost? He ignores his family and his health. His obsession leads to his losing the very thing he sacrificed all other parts of his life to achieve.