I’ve been away for a while. Too many things happened at once.
My wife and I welcomed our fourth child, Julia, who was born on December 9th. Then came the winter break, the end of the year, and the beginning of 2026. So first of all, happy new year.
During those days in the hospital, my mind kept returning to Frank Gehry, who died at the end of 2025. And as the new year began, I also kept thinking about Antoni Gaudí, since 2026 marks one hundred years since his death.
So expect both of them to appear here. Gehry, Gaudí, process, imagination, and the strange amount of time architecture sometimes needs.
I also used this break to think about my own process, and how clarity in the way we work can leave more room for the project itself.
That is where I want to begin.
The Sketch: The great loss
In memory of Frank Gehry.The Thought: The Madman or the Genius
The madness of placing a column in front of a window,and the genius of making it feel inevitable.
The Work: How a Project is Meant to Start
Why the first decisions often decide the fate of the project.
1. The Sketch
The Great Loss
Frank O. Gehry was one of the great architects of our time.
You could argue that he was as much a sculptor as an architect, but that would not quite do him justice. His work came from somewhere more complex: from art, from construction, from rebellion, and from a refusal to accept architecture as “just another f*cking building.”
That spirit is what set him apart.
Gehry was also famously uncomfortable with being described as a deconstructivist, after the 1988 MoMA exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture. I think I understand why.
The term came, at least partly, from the intellectual atmosphere around Jacques Derrida and deconstruction. But Derrida was not writing an architectural style manual. He was developing a way of thinking through contradictions, oppositions, and internal tensions.
Architecture then borrowed the word and turned it into a category based on imagery, cataloguing Gehry’s architecture ever since .
That is where the mismatch begins.
Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid were not simply applying philosophy to buildings. Their work may involve fragmentation, collision, tension, and the breaking apart of program, but not necessarily as a direct translation of Derrida’s thought.
They were not illustrating theory. They were making architecture.
Still, even if I understand why they resisted the label, I also understand why the grouping happened. There is a shared energy in that generation: a willingness to break the box, question composition, and let the building reveal its internal conflicts.
If anything, I think one architect is often missing from that conversation, and that is Enric Miralles.
To close the loop on Gehry, he leaves behind a body of work that speaks for itself. As Tom Emerson of 6a Architects once said:
“The man was a genius.”
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