he would always try to find a sculptural solution to an architectural problem.

Frank almost never started a design with a predetermined shape. He liked to begin by “playing”—a word he used far more often than “working” when he talked about how he went about designing things—with wooden blocks of different sizes, each representing a portion of a building’s functional program. He would then stack or array the blocks in what he

capable of making imaginative shapes,

he believed that good feedback improved his work.

made its architectural form less fluid and more like folds of fabric hundreds of feet high,

he felt he had to reset, or rebalance, his practice

To him, what he had added to his house was more like an exuberant layer of celebratory form, dancing on the surface of the old house, breaking through its walls, and in the end establishing a content, if unorthodox cohabitation with it.

Great art, Stravinsky was saying, is not arbitrary; it emerges out of knowledge and discipline, and of new—daring—ways to work within the constraints of reality to make new kinds of order.

“I was looking for a way to express feeling in three-dimensional objects,”