Your Best Work Is The Work Nobody Picks

The best work I make in any given week is the work nobody picks.

You know the feeling. You sit down with a problem, you come up with the obvious answer, and then, because you're not done, because you can feel there's something better, you keep going. You make a second version. A third. By the time you stop you've got a handful of options spread out in front of you, and one of them is the one you've quietly set your heart on. It's the cleanest. It's the most interesting. You can already see it finished.

And then it doesn't get chosen. Someone picks one of the others, for a reason that's usually correct, which is the maddening part, and the one you loved goes in a drawer. It was never wrong. It just wasn't the answer to this question.

This past week I've been doing exactly this on a new project in the tropics. I explored three schemes; three different ways of organising the site, three different arguments about how the building should sit in the landscape. One of them, the one I'd quietly bet on, is almost certainly not the one we're going forward with. It's the most architecturally interesting of the three. It's also probably the wrong answer for the brief, which is a different thing from being a bad idea.

The discipline has a word for this kind of work. Paper architecture, buildings that exist only on the page. The most famous one in the canon is Étienne-Louis Boullée's Cenotaph for Isaac Newton, drawn in 1784: a hollow sphere 150 metres tall, set into a vast circular base, ringed by hundreds of cypress trees. Inside, nothing but Newton's tomb and light. By day, thousands of pinprick perforations in the shell would have flooded the interior with what looked like a starry sky. By night, a suspended lamp would have glowed at the centre like a sun. It was taller than the Pyramids at Giza. It was never built. It was never going to be built; French 18th-century engineering couldn't have managed it, and Boullée knew that.

Almost none of his work was. He spent a career drawing things at a scale that mocked the possible, libraries and cenotaphs and monuments to death, and historians eventually gave him the name paper architect, which sounds like an insult until you realise the drawings outlasted most of the actual buildings of his contemporaries. They're held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Architects still study them. Hadid's Cardiff Bay Opera House won its competition in 1994, was killed by the funders a year later, and arguably did more for her practice than the building would have. The work nobody chose kept doing work.

A small confession on this thread, while we're here. I'm publishing a project soon; a tropical modern villa, the actual built one, finished and lived in for longer than I'd like to admit. It goes out to the architecture press in June, a date I've said out loud now specifically so I can't quietly let it slide. There's a strange symmetry to releasing something real and complete into the world while sitting at the same desk killing options for a new project I'll never get to make. The built one leaves home. The unbuilt ones don't.

Here's the part I'm still not sure I've made peace with: the work you don't pick is part of the work. It teaches you what the chosen one isn't, which is half of what makes the chosen one good. Boullée's sphere mattered to architecture precisely because it couldn't be made. The options I'm killing this week matter to the project precisely because they're losing.

Reply and tell me, what's the best thing you've made that nobody wanted.

See you next week,
Danny