The Long Shadow of Great Teachers

Teachers change your life in ways that aren’t always obvious, sometimes by opening doors, and sometimes by quietly raising the ceiling so high you don’t realize, for years, why you’re struggling to breathe.

At Yale, during my second year, my work caught the attention of people whose names carried weight long before I understood what that weight meant. I could read a section by then, but I didn’t yet fully comprehend what sections were doing conceptually, or why certain spatial relationships mattered. I was operating on instinct, curiosity, and a confidence that came from being absorbed in the work rather than fluent in its language.

That confidence wasn’t fully earned yet. I didn’t know it at the time.

When Robert A. M. Stern became dean, he gave the school something many of us resisted: gravity. He insisted on architectural history, on lineage, on understanding the long arc of the discipline. He restored Paul Rudolph’s building to its original intention, not because it was fashionable, but because he believed it mattered. At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate what he was doing. Looking back, I see that he was setting a frame meant to outlast taste.

Bob was also the reason I had the opportunity to study with Frank Gehry.

Frank did not teach with explanations. He taught through pressure, rigor, and refusal. He cared about function first. If something didn’t work, its poetry didn’t matter. If it worked, its essence could be exalted. That ethic got under my skin early, sometimes uncomfortably.

He could be very tough. He could also be deeply kind. I’ve always been drawn to people like that. The salty-sweet ones. The straight shooters. Frank had little patience for language standing in for thinking. If you brought him “no,” you’d already lost. What he wanted were solutions, even partial ones, even awkward ones. That expectation shaped how I work more than I realized at the time.

Being chosen by someone like Frank can feel intoxicating. It can also be destabilizing. The bar is suddenly set very high, before you fully understand what’s being asked of you. And because that anointing often happens publicly, the doubt tends to happen privately. Proximity to greatness doesn’t eliminate fear. Sometimes it sharpens it.

I worked with Frank for a decade, then crossed an invisible line and became his client at the Guggenheim. I lived in the space between worlds. Protecting the needs of the art while honoring the ambitions of the architecture. Translating between institutions that required different things. Frank used to joke that I was his “mole” at the Guggenheim. I suspect the Guggenheim thought I was their mole at Gehry Partners. That in-between position taught me how complex authorship really is, and how rarely meaningful work belongs to a single voice.

Mentorship, I’ve learned, is rarely clean. It leaves marks. It creates expectations you may never fully satisfy. It can instill ambition and insecurity in equal measure. What begins as a blessing can feel like a burden. And sometimes, over time, that burden becomes a compass.

Last year, within days of each other, both Frank and Bob died. I had written to Bob shortly before he passed, to thank him. He wrote back. A short, curmudgeonly, generous note. The timing felt uncanny. I didn’t know then how much I would need that small moment of closure.

With their passing, the shadow didn’t disappear. If anything, it became easier to see.

There’s a moment in life when you realize the people you once looked up to are no longer there to look up to. The external permission structure shifts. You’re left with what you absorbed, what you resisted, and what you still haven’t sorted out. It’s disorienting. It can also be clarifying.

I don’t yet know what it means to live fully outside the long shadow of great teachers. I do know that their influence shapes how I think, how I work, and how exacting I can be with myself. I also know that comparison leads nowhere, and the shadow starts to look less like something cast by others and more like something shaped by where I am standing.

Some lessons take a lifetime to surface.
Some teachers are still teaching you long after they’re gone.