Architecture has been my lifelong pursuit — not only as a profession but as a way of interpreting the world. For more than fifty years I have watched buildings rise and fall, institutions reform and retreat, and theories bloom like spring ephemerals only to fade beneath the unrelenting demands of budgets, clients, and human imperfection. Through it all, I have come to believe that good architecture, like good character, should leave no scar upon the land, the city, or the lives of those it serves.
This book was not written as a celebration of the architect’s ego or a catalog of past achievements. It is instead a reflection on the discipline itself — what it once aspired to be, what it has become, and what it still might recover. Architecture without a scar is not a utopian ideal. It is a philosophy of restraint, empathy, and purpose: a belief that buildings should solve problems without creating new ones, and that the measure of a designer’s success lies as much in what he withholds as in what he creates.
The essays and recollections that follow come from a lifetime spent navigating that delicate balance — between vision and responsibility, ambition and humility, permanence and change. They are offered not as final answers, but as invitations to reconsider what it means to build thoughtfully in a world that too often confuses spectacle with substance.
If there is a single message within these pages, it is that architecture matters most when it disappears into the fabric of human experience — when its presence uplifts without calling attention to itself, when it enhances rather than dominates, and when, in time, it leaves behind not a scar, but a legacy of grace.
