AS Parliament House celebrates its 25th anniversary, the story has been told, many times over, of how a cohort of architectural families relocated from Philadelphia to Canberra to work on the new building and ended up staying.

Indeed, the Centenary’s creative director, Robyn Archer, has characterised it as the continuation of an architectural tradition that began with the Burley Griffins.

By chance, I recently encountered a descendant of this latter-day emigration, not here but in New York City. I met up with writer James Guida in Bryant Park, just outside New York Public Library, which he uses as “just a working space.”

He’s a flourishing non-fiction writer who won a coveted fellowship in Nonfiction Literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2011.

A regular with “The New Yorker” online, Guida has also written for “The Los Angeles Review of Books” and “The Yale Review”. I even saw a story in Australia’s “Meanjin” on his passion – skateboarding.

Recommended to me as a brilliant young Canberran going places in NYC, Guida turned out to be the son of one of those Philadelphia architects.

His dad came here to work for Mitchell/Giurgola & Thorp Architects and stayed on, joining former colleagues to form Guida Moseley Brown Architects, the team that designed the new Canberra Airport.

Guida considers himself “an ingrained Canberran”, one who enjoys catching up with expatriate Canberrans in Manhattan. Just talking, he says, “makes it seem seductive to go back to Canberra”.

“It’s the magpies, that’s what’s great about Canberra – the wildlife everywhere,” he says.

“Canberra people like to talk. When I was growing up there wasn’t much clubbing so people at dinner parties or somebody’s barbecue sat around talking for eight hours or more.”

Growing up in the ‘80s in Canberra, his education followed a familiar trajectory – Forrest Primary School and lots of skateboarding, then to Canberra Grammar School and later to the ANU for a year. Eventually, he switched to the University of Melbourne then to University College Dublin, where he did an MA in Anglo-Irish literature.

What was next? Guida possessed one enviable asset – dual Australian-US citizenship, so headed for the Big Apple and a job briefly working for the celebrated independent literary publishing firm FSG that, famously, had T. S. Eliot on its books.

In September 2009, his big break came, with the publication of an idiosyncratic 21st-century style book on aphorisms, “Marbles”, described in “Time Out” as “incisive, strange, and often philosophically compelling”.

He must have been especially chuffed to read “The Brooklyn Rail’s” enthusiastic compliment: “The native Australian brings a literary, even poetic accent to his axioms.”

When I meet Guida, he’s reviewing a new book about Philadelphia hip hop/soul band, The Roots. He’s previously done a story for “N+1 Magazine” on books written by rappers such as Jay-Z, whose art, he says, comes from “a complex word world”. It excites him to think of the “very incisive and brilliantly phrased” hip-hop lyrics that get young people excited – “young people can tell vibrancy immediacy”.

As we talk under a domineering statue of Gertrude Stein, I twist Guida’s arm for his favourite aphorism. Here it is, from George Santayana: “Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.”

Guida’s essays can be read at jamesguida.com/essays-reviews