01THE MIND DOESN'T CLOCK OFF

My mind rarely stops working. I see dependencies, contradictions, missing pieces, unexpected relationships and possibilities almost everywhere. A problem in one field can remind me of a mechanism from an entirely different one. I do not particularly care where the academic borders have been drawn. If the relationships are there, I want to understand them.

For me, architecture is not simply a profession or a particular kind of document. It is a way of thinking and, more importantly, something I genuinely enjoy doing. There is enormous pleasure in taking a complicated, apparently incoherent whole and discovering that it can be understood, reconstructed and made to work.

I know that my intellectual abilities are exceptional. I do not find it useful to pretend otherwise for the sake of appearing modest. I also know that unusual abilities do not magically remove the effort involved in creating something substantial. Being able to see an architecture does not mean it will design, validate and document itself.

There is another consequence to the way I think: I have a remarkably poor relationship with questions that demand a simple answer where none exists.

What is the best solution? Which car is better? What music do I prefer? Is that approach right?

It depends.

I realise how irritating that can be. Unfortunately, reality has never shown much interest in making its answers convenient.

02CORPORATE ETIQUETTE IS NOT MY RELIGION

People sometimes mistake professional precision for conventional corporate behaviour. I have very little interest in the latter.

I can discuss an architecture with absolute seriousness and explain an organisational failure using language that would never survive a communications department. I have described businesses whose dashboards are no longer green because, apparently, the dashboards have turned golden. I have written about executives drinking champagne paid for with money borrowed from the future.

That is not decorative sarcasm. It is how I sometimes express the absurdity of a situation more accurately than a polished paragraph of management vocabulary ever could.

And when somebody tries to turn a professional discussion into a contest of status, I am entirely capable of saying something like:

“Oh, I know you want to prove you have bigger balls than me. No worries. You definitely have bigger balls than me. Now, can we get back to work?”

It tends to make the point.

I am not a conventional corporate employee, and I am not a consultant who arrives to perform corporate etiquette. I am an architect. I have my own judgement, my own expertise, and a responsibility to the quality of the architecture I create. None of those things improves because I choose my words to protect somebody else's ego.

I have been a company director myself. I know perfectly well that hierarchy exists for a reason. When I am responsible for an organisation, someone must make decisions, assign responsibility and hold people accountable. If I am the boss, I am the boss.

But a client's chief executive is not my boss. They represent an organisation that wants to use my capabilities. I am there as an independent professional, not as another rung in their reporting structure. We can disagree. We can speak directly. We can even laugh. None of that prevents us from doing serious work.

I sometimes joke that my employees are welcome to dislike me, or even call me an arsehole, provided they do their jobs properly. The joke contains a very real distinction: professional roles and personal reverence are not the same thing.

I respect responsibility. I do not worship titles.

03AN UNNECESSARILY LARGE SIGN

I should probably admit at this point that my sense of proportion does not always apply to humour.

One day, I want a home near the Tatras: a rather private building with a dark exterior, carefully controlled light and very little desire to announce itself to the road. Quiet. Restrained. Almost hidden.

And beside the garage, I intend to put a monumental, illuminated Archestral Studio emblem. Not a tasteful little plaque. Something several metres high, glowing electric cyan, gloriously and entirely unnecessarily conspicuous.

I originally encountered the idea while looking at an illustration that was completely unsuitable for the professional design we were working on. It made me laugh. Then I realised I genuinely wanted to build it.

Yes, I know how ridiculous that sounds.

That is precisely why I like it.

04ENTER PADRE MATEO

I am a sauna master. And a sauna, it turns out, can be an excellent theatre.

There is music, heat, movement, ritual, a room full of people and the opportunity to tell a story without the slightest need for a PowerPoint presentation. I love creating performances in which the ridiculous and the serious can coexist.

One of my creations is Padre Mateo.

Picture a man entering in a clerical collar and greeting the room with a hearty, rather suspiciously cheerful, “Good evening, my dear children.” There are church bells. There is electronic music, including a techno interpretation of a prayer. There is an absurdly ornate blue chalice, complete with a dragon, which looks as though it was borrowed from a particularly extravagant fantasy series. At one point, an ice sphere receives a degree of ceremonial reverence that it has done absolutely nothing to deserve.

It is deliberately excessive. That is the fun of it.

But there is another version: a three-act performance I call The Service of Burning Away Sins in a Foretaste of Hellfire.

First comes Padre Mateo, complete with his theatrical ceremony and irreverent humour. Then the bells ring again, and the priest disappears. In his place arrives the devil: horns, beard, a much more intense atmosphere, and the promise that he will return for the audience.

Afterwards comes the final act. No priest. No devil. No spectacular costume. I return as myself, with an ordinary sauna fan and quiet music.

And I ask the people in front of me to look at one another.

Here they are, without their job titles, their bank balances, their cars, their expensive possessions or the usual symbols of status. Just human beings, sitting together. Does anyone genuinely believe that they are worth more as a person than somebody else in that room?

I do not give them a speech about the answer. I continue the gentle movement of the fan until the music ends, put it down and walk out without another word.

I love the joke. I love the performance. I also love the silence that can follow it.

Theatre lets me express things that I cannot always communicate as completely through ordinary conversation. Sound, movement, timing, humour, costume, heat and silence can say something together that no individual sentence could quite contain.

05THROUGH THE VIEWFINDER

Photography gives me another kind of theatre, but its most important element is not the camera.

It is the relationship with the person in front of it.

I talk. I joke. I observe. I get to know people, and I let them get to know me. Sometimes I spend so much time building a comfortable relationship that the camera eventually becomes almost irrelevant to the person I am photographing. They stop managing every expression. Something genuine appears.

I enjoy catching an unrepeatable moment: a child's expression while playing, somebody laughing without thinking about how they look, a gesture that lasts a fraction of a second. I also enjoy the opposite extreme — an elaborate scene planned down to its visual relationships and then created in the physical world for a real photograph.

I do not want to manufacture the important parts afterwards. I care about what was truly in front of the lens: the light, the person, the moment, the scene. The technical craft exists to capture it, not to replace it.

There is a photograph I want to make one day that probably explains the other side of my imagination rather well.

An enormous full moon. Black wings. Smoke. Fire tracing something close to a cross across the composition. The image must overwhelm the viewer at first glance. I want the initial response to be nothing more sophisticated than wow.

Only on a second or third look should another image emerge from within that spectacle: a woman, completely naked, with a genuinely plus-size body. Wide hips, full thighs, cellulite, tattoos, perhaps a scar from a caesarean birth. Not a digitally perfected body. A real woman with a real history.

The flames may obscure parts of her body. They are allowed to dominate the first impression. The woman is not a detail accidentally left in the background, though. She is the discovery waiting inside the spectacle.

And the decisive work will happen before the photograph is taken.

I want to know the model well enough for her to feel at ease with me and my camera. The rest of the crew will be women. The scene itself will be made physically, with professionals responsible for its effects. But what I most want to create cannot be supplied by a technician or added in editing.

I want the woman to stand there feeling beautiful, proud and entirely herself. Not acting confident. Not imitating some prescribed idea of beauty. Actually feeling it.

I know I can affect the way people see themselves. There is a particular pride in seeing somebody stand taller, smile differently or recognise something worthwhile in their own reflection. That is one of the things I love most about photographing people.

The final picture matters enormously. So does what happens to the person while we make it.

06A VOICE OF MY OWN

I sing. Properly. I am a baritone, and singing is not a passing hobby I mention because it sounds good in a biography.

I enjoy the craft: phrasing, control, breathing, shaping a piece of music so that it becomes a performance rather than a sequence of correctly produced notes. I also enjoy what happens once the technique is no longer the thing anybody notices.

My repertoire can move from Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Michael Bublé to Andrea Bocelli, songs from musical theatre, rock, and whatever else speaks to me. Then I might happily spend the evening listening to techno with an indecent amount of bass.

People occasionally expect such preferences to fit neatly into one coherent category. They do not. I have never understood why they should.

For me, music is not a list of genres I have agreed to support. It is a collection of different possibilities for expression. Sometimes I want elegance. Sometimes power. Sometimes warmth. Sometimes I just want the bass to shake something.

I have performed for people and recorded my own singing. At times I have seriously wondered whether I should pursue it much further.

I still might.

07LEARNING THE HUMAN MIND

There is something slightly paradoxical about how much time I have spent learning to understand other people.

I am autistic. My mind works differently, and parts of the social and emotional world that many people seem to navigate instinctively have required deliberate study from me. I have had to examine human behaviour, motivation, reactions and psychological mechanisms with considerable care.

Over time, that conscious learning became a strength of its own.

I can be very good at reading another person's behaviour and recognising what may lie behind it. I notice patterns, contradictions, insecurities and possibilities. I can often see when a person's difficulty is not the absence of ability but the circumstances in which they are trying to use it.

I do not need to experience somebody else's emotions in exactly the way they do in order to understand what may be happening. Understanding a person's psychological processes and emotionally sharing their experience are not identical things.

None of this turns human beings into equations, and it certainly does not mean I am infallible. People are complicated. That is part of what makes understanding them interesting.

It also means that my work with people is not limited to analysing them. I am interested in what changes when somebody begins to see themselves differently.

08WHAT I CAN HELP PEOPLE SEE

I know I can influence people. I can teach, challenge, insist, provoke and sometimes push much harder than they expected. I am not always gentle, and I have never believed that constant reassurance is the only way to help somebody grow.

I have seen people develop abilities they once doubted they possessed. Sometimes that involves practical skills or professional judgement. Sometimes it involves the more difficult task of recognising that they are not as incapable as they have been taught to think.

I take pride in being able to recognise potential and help turn it into something concrete. It is not about collecting grateful people or having somebody admire me. The genuinely satisfying moment is when they discover that they can do something they previously believed was beyond them.

A woman feeling beautiful in front of a camera. Somebody realising that a complicated task is within their reach. A person whose assessment of their own capabilities finally begins to change.

These moments may look very different. They mean a great deal to me for much the same reason.

And I am perfectly comfortable saying that I am proud of my ability to contribute to them.

09STILL HUMAN

I do not believe that everyone has the same abilities. We do not. Some people can do things that others cannot, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. I know that my own intellectual profile is unusually strong, and I have no intention of apologising for recognising it.

But intelligence is not human worth.

A job title is not human worth. Neither is a bank balance, a car, a reputation or the ability to solve a problem more quickly than somebody else.

I can be the most intelligent person in a room and still be only one person among others. A chief executive can hold more organisational authority than an employee without being a more valuable human being. A person who thinks very differently from me has exactly the same claim to dignity.

Maybe this is why I like the final act of Padre Mateo so much. After the costumes, music, devil, jokes and heat, the question left in the sauna is wonderfully simple. What remains when we stop confusing status with the person?

I spend a great deal of my life building architectures, but I am not an architecture. I sing. I photograph. I make ridiculous jokes. I can be direct to the point of discomfort. I perform an outrageously theatrical parody of a religious service. I like seeing people discover their own possibilities. I plan to install a completely disproportionate neon emblem outside a very discreet house.

I contain all those things without needing them to make me consistent in somebody else's eyes.

The architect is real.

He is just not the whole story.

I am a genius. I am also human.

— Mateusz Chrzanowski