Soda - Keeping Curious

Over the weekend I watched the documentary ‘My Architect’. In this moving and engrossing film, documentary filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn’s sets off on a journey - one that took him five years - to try to understand and come to terms with the father he never really knew and rarely saw. His father was Louis Kahn, one of the most important and revered architects of the 20th Century, and although he died in 1974 when Nathaniel was only 11, the adult Nathaniel finally ends up with a real sense of who his Dad was through the serenely beautiful buildings he left behind.

Now the point I wish to make here is that Louis Kahn’s intensely personal style, and the world renown that followed came comparatively late in life. He was in his fifties before he hit his stride; with all of his recognised masterpieces being produced within a 20-year span that ended with his sudden death aged 73. It struck me that the history of architecture is strewn with late developers. Look at the likes of Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind, who only took up the practice of architecture after an early career as a musical protegee. I’m a great believer in Woody Allen’s dictum that 95% of success is about just turning-up, and always find it a real pleasure (and a comfort) to come across people such as Kahn, Gehry and Libeskind who spend a life time clocking-in, patiently (one imagines) perfecting their art and knowledge until a heart-felt, idiosyncratic style emerges. In all of these cases it has been well worth the wait.

So, my advice is to keep just turning-up, building your career one brick at a time, until the time comes, in the words of those Funky Business practitioners Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Riddlestrale, to ‘explode in a dramatic frenzy of value creation during a short space of time’.