Infused with a passion for architecture and guided by his Islamic faith, the Hall of Fame center has scored big as Houston's most distinctive real estate magnate

	Where Are They Now? Choose a story The 1972 A's Sal Bando The Hanson Brothers Chris Hinton Larry Holmes & Gerry Cooney Tommy John Marquette Hoops Mario Mendoza Hakeem Olajuwon Joe Rudi Picabo Street Mo Vaughn Gallery: Where Will They Be?
	When he and his family aren't in Jordan, Olajuwon finds time to study at his stylish house outside Houston. Joe McNally
	RELATED • Photo Gallery: Where Will They Be?

By Alexander Wolff

This Where Are They Now feature and others like it can be found in the July 2nd issue of Sports Illustrated.

In 1994, when 7-foot Hakeem Olajuwon was leading the Houston Rockets to the first of two straight NBA titles and becoming the league's MVP, it seemed the world wanted nothing so much as his autograph. That very year the man nicknamed the Dream had his own autograph seeker's thrill. He landed the signature of someone quite different from himself -- or perhaps not so different, for the noted architect Philip Johnson dedicated a copy of his book Glass House, "From the artist to an even greater artist."

Today Olajuwon, 44, proudly shows off that book in the living room of his home in Sugar Land, Texas, outside of Houston, a house inspired by Johnson and such modernist contemporaries as Richard Meier, Hugh Newell Jacobsen and Luis Barragán, as well as the Venetian Palladian style and the traditions of Olajuwon's Islamic faith. NBA big men are a lot like architects: Their first loyalties are to the functional -- score, rebound, block shots -- but the best synthesize existing modes with an artistic flourish or two. Like the architecture of his house, Olajuwon's aesthetic in the low post blended the old and the new. "To make the center position fun -- that was my vision," he says. "To add shakes and bakes and moves. If you're a center, you're thought to be mechanical. But when I faced up on a guy, I was no longer a center. I was a small forward."

Defenders never knew which of the diverse skills, learned during his multisport upbringing in Nigeria, the Dream would call upon: light feet from soccer, power and craftiness from team handball, hand-eye coordination from table tennis, sudden levitation from high jumping and volleyball. "My game was to play the same as a little guy, a cat's game -- but with big cats," says Olajuwon, who averaged 21.8 points and 11.1 rebounds over 18 seasons, and won a gold medal with the U.S. at the 1996 Olympics. (He became a U.S. citizen in 1993.) "One or two hard dribbles in traffic. Quickness. And timing."

In Utah he was once heckled by fans who accused him of traveling; afterward he told the press he was simply deploying "advanced moves." Hey, this was Bauhaus basketball. If a few philistines couldn't appreciate it, that was their own fault.

Indeed, the vernacular of the center position is straight out of the building trade -- the blocks, the post, the paint. Olajuwon himself was part of an imposing structure: For three seasons he and 7'4" Ralph Sampson formed the Rockets' Twin Towers. In light of all that, the NBA's alltime leader with 3,830 blocked shots could hardly have more appropriate postcareer pursuits than architecture and its commercial sibling, real estate.