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The three best-loved structures on the people's list are the Empire State Building, the White House, and the Washington National Cathedral, designed by men most Americans have never heard of. The professionals' fixation on novelty and design innovation causes them to dismiss the wide staircases and tall columns so loved by the average American.

AS boaters clunked their oars on the Lake, Witold Rybczynski folded his big frame onto a little chair by a tiny cafe table at the boathouse and talked about how he came to write about the man who created Central Park almost a century and a half ago. ''I think I thought about the notion of biography first,'' said Mr. Rybczynski, whose new book, ''A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century'' (Scribner, $28), takes an intimate look at the man who first joined the words landscape and architecture and created an art. ''My books tend to ramble on about things,'' said Mr. Rybczynski, 56, an architect who has written eight personable, philosophical books, including ''The Most Beautiful House in the World'' (Viking, 1989), in which the writer falls in love with the idea of building a boat, which then needs a boathouse, which somehow turns into a house, and on and on like that.

[Witold Rybczynski], renowned for his writing on architecture, first heard about the project when it was just 36 hectares of cornfield.

The question, posed to [Witold Rybczynski] by his editor at the New York Times, makes for a fascinating journey. Initially he considers, and discards, a number of different tools: eyeglasses, power tools, handsaws, the plane, hammers and the carpenter's brace, while giving some historical insight into these tools. Rybczynski and his wife built a house with the use of hand tools, so he has a good practical knowledge and respect for them. Tracking down the historical age of the screwdriver is interesting. The Oxford English dictionary places the first reference to a screwdriver to 1812 in a book by Glaswegian Peter Nicholson entitled Mechanical Exercises. Following Nicholson's references, Rybczynski tracks down Joseph Moxon, a printer and friend of Samuel Pepys. In 1693, he issued a book entitled Mechanick Exercises: the Doctrine of Handy-Works.

ONE DAY ABOUT 15 years ago, Witold Rybczynski (pronounced RIB- SHIN-SKI) rang up Ralph Lauren's office hoping to speak with the famous designer. Rybczynski, an unknown professor of architecture at Montreal's McGill University, was writing a book about domestic comfort. The book, actually, was a little hard to explain. It was to be a history of the home, an inquiry into how cultural forces shape styles of decoration and architecture. Or something like that. In any case, Rybczynski told Ralph Lauren's assistant that one of the chapters would discuss the Lauren home-furnishing line. Rybczynski has a freaky knack for seeing the interconnectedness of things. Consider the automobile, an innovation he goes back to in several of his books. Car ownership influenced homebuilding, for example. A century ago the persona of a family was expressed by the manner in which it furnished the parlour. But as the family car became the portable, public face of the household, the parlour disappeared (not to mention that car travel became an alternative to sedentary parlour life). Then, in Waiting for the Weekend, Rybczynski showed how the modern view of leisure as escape sprang from car travel. The hallowed tradition of the weekend cottage is only as recent as the automobile. And in City Life, Rybczynski suggested the distinctive features of urban North America -- suburbs, shopping malls, sprawl -- emerged in part because automobiles allowed people to buy a week's worth of groceries in one go. Academic authors who enjoy commercial success are called popularizers, often a pejorative term in the university. It's true Rybczynski's books have broad appeal. On his office wall is a laminated photograph from The Star, the supermarket tabloid. The photograph, taken by paparazzi, shows the late Jacqueline Onassis lounging on a beach chair with her nose in a book. You can make out the cover of the book: The Most Beautiful House in the World by Witold Rybczynski. Published in 1989, it was Rybczynski's account of designing and building his own house in Hemingford, Que., outside Montreal. The book is filled with Rybczynski's characteristic digressions -- on the symbolism of trees, the homes of famous people, the depiction of architects in Hollywood.