The brief asked for a building that would still look right in thirty years, which is a polite way of asking for one that does not look like this year. Nobody on the team had done that before, and the first three schemes were, in hindsight, simply the three things that were fashionable at the time.

The fourth came from the client, or rather from a question she asked in a meeting that was meant to be about something else.

It is not a design method and nobody has since tried to make it one. But it reframed the job as subtraction, and a team that is taking things away argues about different things than a team that is adding them.

The scheme that got built is the fourth one with two more things taken out of it, both at her suggestion, both in the last week.