The Man Who Draws the Tree From Above

I do not like writing about myself, and I have spent years arranging not to. The name at the foot of these articles is a pen name, chosen so that the ideas would travel without the man, so that an argument about a city or a facade would be weighed on its merit and not on the standing of whoever made it. Most people who sign their own name are reaching, however politely, for recognition. I arranged the opposite. So understand that when a man who built a wall precisely so he would not be seen above it decides, once, to climb onto it and speak, he has a reason. Mine is simple. I am in my early forties, the questions keep coming, in meetings and after lectures, about how this began and where the ideas come from, and I have concluded that if I do not write my own story, I do not expect anyone else to have the decency to write it for me.

So let me start where the eye started. My first car was a BMW Z3, pistachio green, with a black canvas roof and a black interior, and I drove it as a very young man the way some people wear a conviction. It was a strange and rare thing where I lived, perhaps nine of them across my city and the towns around it, and I did not love it for that. I loved it for the color against the cloth, the dark cabin wrapped inside that soft pale shell, the taut line of a body that looked drawn rather than manufactured. I would sit in it and feel that someone had made every surface answer to every other, the green to the black, the curve to the fall of the roof, and that this agreement among parts was a kind of beauty I did not yet have a word for. I could draw cars, extremely well, better than I could do anything else at that age, and I assumed this meant I would become a designer of them. I decided, on the strength of nothing, to study mechanical engineering, without the faintest idea what a mechanical engineer actually does. That was the whole of my self knowledge at seventeen. Not a plan. A hand that understood curves, and a chest that tightened at a beautiful object.

The Tree Seen From Above

I turned toward architecture for a reason as human as reasons get. My father was an architect. The entrance examination was partly an interview and partly a small drawing test, and one of the things they asked us to draw was a tree seen from above. Sit for a moment with how strange that instruction is to a seventeen year old. A tree from above. Almost every student in that room glanced left and right, hesitated, and drew a tree the way a child draws one, from the side, a trunk and a spreading crown, because that is the tree we all carry in our heads. I drew a circle with a dot at its center, and I drew it without the slightest sense that it was clever, which is the only honest kind of different there is.

I drew it that way because I had watched my father draw it a hundred times at his desk, and once, when I was small, I had asked him about it. A circle with a dot? And he said yes, that is a tree from above, the canopy a circle and the trunk a single point at its heart. I had forgotten the exchange entirely until the pencil was in my hand in that room, and then it surfaced, not as knowledge I possessed but as a reflex I had absorbed by watching a man work. This is the truest scene in the whole story, truer than any later success, because an architectural education can begin years before any university, in nothing more than a child watching the side of his father’s hand move across a page. The circle with the dot came to me through him, and I have never pretended otherwise.

The Teacher Who Knew My Future

University was where the difference I had only felt became something others could see, and it was where I met the man this piece keeps circling. A studio teacher I admired, and I will not name him or place him, because his dignity does not deserve to be spent on this page and the story does not need it. We clashed, openly, in front of the whole studio, in one of those confrontations everyone present still remembers. I was sharp with him, and I make no apology for it, because I was defending work I believed in against a man determined to dismantle it rather than teach it. Afterward he asked me to apologize before the students, and I did, because I had crossed a line in the manner and not in the substance. The first of several ironies is that I took ninety nine in his course. He was, for all our friction, a capable teacher, and I remained one of his admirers even while I fought him.

But he carried his verdict about me all the way to the final jury, the day a graduating architect defends the whole of his work before the faculty. From where I stood, he used that jury to reopen our old quarrel, criticizing and criticizing again, and each time I answered him. And then he said the sentence this entire piece exists to examine. He told me, in front of everyone, that in the end I would be an employee. That mine was the character of an employee. An excellent one, he was careful to add, but an employee, a man who would execute another person’s vision and never hold his own. He said it with the calm certainty of someone convinced he could read an entire life from a single semester, looking at a sharp and difficult twenty three year old and feeling sure he had found the ceiling of him.

I graduated in 2006 carrying that word. I will not insult you with the tidy revenge version of what came next, because the truth is better than revenge and does not need my help to sting. The years turned. I grew into the profession, built a standing of my own, and opened a practice. And in 2015, considering whether to return to university for further study, I went back to my old campus, and there he was. We spoke, and he proposed that he visit my office. Some days later he came. He was received on the lower floor and sent up to me, and when he entered he looked older, his head carried a little lower than I remembered it. He sat with me first. Later he stepped into the neighboring office to greet my father. He praised my progress at some length, warmly, far more warmly than any jury, and then, in the most ordinary professional manner, he proposed that we collaborate on projects together. The man who had once been certain I would spend my life executing other people’s visions had come, nine years on, to propose that we execute some together. I did not remind him of 2006. The room did that without me.

The One Thing I Built From Under Zero

I owe the beginning of my eye to my father, and I have said so plainly, so let me now claim the one undertaking that owes nothing to anyone, because a man is allowed to know the difference between what he inherited and what he made. ArchUp is mine, built from under zero. There was no editorial institution waiting with my name on the door, no ready audience, no inherited reputation in publishing, no guarantee that a word of it would ever pay for itself. There was a conviction that architecture deserved a serious voice in this language and this region, and there were years of work behind that conviction, experimentation that failed and was rebuilt, money committed with no promise of return, an editorial standard assembled piece by piece, and the particular stubbornness it takes to keep an independent publication alive when nothing about the arithmetic encourages you to. That is the thing I point to when the word self made is on the table. Not the eye, which was a gift. This.

What the Moment Actually Meant

The meaning of 2015 is not that I won and he lost. It is that a thoughtful and capable man, one I admired and learned from and still credit with part of what I know, looked at me across a jury table and believed he could see the entire arc of a person from the vantage of one difficult semester, and he was wrong. Not because he was foolish, but because the thing he was attempting cannot be done. No one can read a finished life from the moment they happen to be looking at it. The student in front of you is not a sentence. He is a single word, and you have no idea yet what the sentence will say.

Writing this in 2026, I notice a symmetry I could not have seen in either earlier year, and it turns a private memory into something worth publishing. In 2006 a man tried to predict my professional future from one reading of me. Today I write from inside an age in which vast systems, the artificial intelligences now folded into every corner of our work, presume to predict the future of entire professions from their reading of the present. The teacher and the machine commit the same ancient error at different scales, the belief that what a person or a craft is now determines what it must become. I have lived the refutation of that error, in my own small way, and perhaps that is the real authority behind these articles. Not that I run a practice, but that I was once declared a ceiling and quietly turned out to be a door.

This is why I write, and why I write as I do, and it connects to the other times I have let a little of myself onto the page. When I wrote an elegy for architecture, and when I wrote about the real opium of our field, and when I let an artificial intelligence interview me and published the strange honest result, I was not grieving and I was not performing. I was documenting. We are living through one of the great hinge moments of human work, the way earlier generations lived the shift from the agricultural to the industrial, and the industrial to the digital, and now the digital into whatever this age of artificial intelligence will come to be called. I am not standing in the ruins to weep. The design professions are not ending, the cities are not ending, the work of construction is not ending, but all of it is shifting beneath us faster than anyone can fully watch, and a man who lived the old way and is living into the new one owes it to the record to write down what the passage actually felt like from inside. I write for my students, whom I count as my children, for the colleagues I have not yet met, and for whoever inherits the projects and the practices we are raising now. The serious architectural research of this decade is not only about tools and materials. It is about memory, about setting down an honest account of a profession at the precise instant it transforms, before the details blur. That too is a form of sustainability, the keeping of a true record so the next generation need not reconstruct us from rumor.

On ordinary days I keep my name off the work, and I will climb back down off this wall the moment the piece is done, and the news of the field and the competitions that thrill everyone will go on without my face attached to any of it, which is exactly how I want it. I have told this story only because the questions kept coming and silence had begun to cost more than speech. And the ending I want is not a lesson, because I distrust lessons, but a return to that examination room, to the seventeen year old with a pencil who did not know what a mechanical engineer was, did not know what he would become, did not know anything at all except how a beautiful shape tightened his chest. He drew a small circle with a dot at its center because he had watched his father’s hand, and he had no idea, none, that an entire life was about to spiral out of that one borrowed mark. That is the truest thing I know about futures, my own and everyone else’s. We are all, always, drawing the tree from above, setting down a mark whose meaning only the long years will disclose, and no teacher and no machine, however certain of itself, has ever once been able to tell us in advance what it will grow into.

✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight

This piece is a personal memoir rather than an analytical document, and the editorial framework requires naming that genre departure before proceeding — but the essay anticipates the objection and partially disarms it, because its author submits his own life to the same forensic scrutiny this archive applies to buildings, refusing the triumph narrative and insisting on the accurate version instead. That discipline produces the essay’s one genuinely structural contribution: the recognition that the teacher’s 2006 verdict and the artificial intelligence now predicting the future of entire professions are making the identical error at different scales — the error of believing that what a person or a craft is now determines what it must become. This is analytically useful precisely because it exposes the hidden mechanism beneath every current forecast about architecture’s automation: a prediction about a profession’s future is not a neutral reading of present capability but a claim that forecloses alternatives, and when that claim is issued by a system with sufficient institutional authority, it risks functioning as the jury’s sentence functioned — as a ceiling installed in the mind of the person it describes, which connects directly to the formation crisis this archive traced in The Consulting Pyramid Is Collapsing From the Bottom Up and Between Two Films. The essay’s most honest structural admission, however, is the one it makes against its own argument: the circle with the dot was inherited, not earned, a gift of a father already inside the profession and a family that could support a start — which quietly concedes that the refutation of deterministic prediction was itself underwritten by inherited advantage, and that the door the author became was one the formation economy of the profession has never distributed equally, a distinction the next generation of twenty-five-year-olds, entering without the father’s hand or the automated base that once funded the climb, will encounter not as memoir but as the defining structural condition of whether they are permitted to grow into anything at all.

Ibrahim Fawakherji — ArchUp