Sofield’s parents raised him in a vaguely Japanese house of simple planes, space interiors, and “such beautiful raw plaster walls that we never hung anything, which probably accounts for my tendency to lean rather than hang, artwork.” If there was a downside to this clean approach, it was his mother’s doling out to the garbage-man, over months, pieces of a cast-iron building facade that Sofield had way-laid en route to a salvage yard.