Think Different

I started my architecture career in 2000. On the wall of the Santa Monica office where I worked was Frank Gehry’s Think Different Apple ad. I walked past it every day. It jumped off the wall at me then. It still does.

The world was changing quickly. The internet was going mainstream. Personal computing was reshaping how we worked. Cell phones were becoming normal. Frank was experimenting with new tools too. CATIA, borrowed from shipbuilding, was replacing human calculation to make soft, improbable forms buildable. It didn’t feel incremental. It felt like a reset.

I didn’t have language for it at the time. I only knew it by feel.

Twenty-five years later, we’re in another moment like that. Artificial intelligence is reshaping creative work. Institutions feel brittle. Funding is evaporating. Long-standing systems are being questioned or abandoned altogether. And Frank is gone.

I keep trying to extract a lesson from that symmetry, from the timing, from the losses, from the sense of recurrence, and I’m finding that I can’t do it honestly yet. Summarizing it flattens something that still feels very alive and unresolved.

Transitions are often framed as opportunities, and I believe that’s true. But they’re also disorienting. Especially when they involve the loss of mentors, the aging of parents, and the quiet realization that the external structures you relied on to orient yourself are no longer there.

I recognize this moment. I’ve been here before. But I’m in a different position now, and I don’t yet know what that requires of me.

For now, all I can say with confidence is that think different still resonates. Not as a slogan, but as a condition. A reminder that clarity doesn’t arrive first. You feel the shift before you understand it. And sometimes the most honest response is to stay with the question a little longer.