Not at all. Before I was an architect, I was a drummer. I toured with a band through my early twenties, and music was the thing I expected my life to be organized around. Architecture arrived slowly, then all at once. The first project I ever completed was a speculative house I designed with my brother while I was still a student. It sold before we finished it, which was both a shock and a lesson. Over the years that followed, I was pulled closer to architecture through conversations rather than through any single decision — co-founding in 1998 with Isaac Broid and Miquel Adrià, sitting at a table with a Mexican generation that was reopening the profession for voices like mine. I did not choose architecture so much as architecture became the place my questions fit. Touring the many countries as a drummer taught me to watch how bodies move through cities and the importance of how spaces and buildings made you feel. That turned out to be an architectural education.

The first question I ask every client, before I draw a line, is: what are you giving back to the community? Not the building. Not the brief. The community. If the client cannot answer that question, or if the answer they give is a formality rather than a real commitment, I have learned that the project will not become architecture. It will become construction with a brand on it. Translation comes after. Once the reciprocity is real, I treat the brief itself as a design problem. The Nestlé Chocolate Museum was commissioned as a factory tour and store but became a cultural institution. The National Film Institute was commissioned as a movie theater renovation and became one of the most inhabited public spaces in Mexico City. In each case, the first act of architecture was to rewrite the question. And follow up with reciprocity.

I do not think about style. I think about method. The sentence I have come to use to describe what my practice does is: design the brief, design the team, and design the building simultaneously, because the only way to build what does not yet exist is to invent how to build it together. The forms that result are the record of that method, not its cause. 

A big part of that method is the insistence on local craft. Every project of mine is digital in its design and local in its fabrication. We learn from the community, its culture, its craft, and work it into the brief. I believe strongly in the cross-pollination between digital design and craft. Everybody learns from each other.

If my buildings share something across twenty-five years of my practice, it is probably a willingness to let each project invent its own formal language in response to what the brief, the team, and the local builders were capable of imagining together with us, rather than applying a signature from outside.

Whether the building gives something back to people who did not commission it. The commissioning client is satisfied or unsatisfied, but they were always going to be one or the other, and their opinion is temporary, but the buildings stay. What matters over time is the person who walks by the building for years, who sits in its shade, who crosses its threshold without being asked to consume, who lives near it and watches it become part of the neighborhood. If the building holds that relationship well, if the reciprocity is real and sustained, then to me, the architecture exists. If it does not, it is just a structure with a facade.

There is a second thing I have come to pay attention to, which I describe to myself in the language of hardware and software. The hardware of a building is everything the architect and the builders produce, the walls, the roof, the ground plane, the steel, the concrete, the light. The software is what the institution running the building programs into it afterwards, the activations, the events, the civic life, the community uses that turn the object into a place.

I have learned, sometimes painfully, that architects can deliver the hardware at a very high standard and still watch the software never arrive. A façade designed as a stage for cultural programming, handed to a marketing team that only knows how to sell, can sit empty for ten years. The hardware is ready. The software never came.

So the thing I now watch most carefully, once a building is in use, is whether the institution that inherited it is actually running the software. Foro Boca runs its software year after year, a place for other things to happen, book fairs, films on the façade, the philharmonic, public activation, and that is why it is alive. Other buildings I have designed are technically open but operationally dormant. The architecture is not complete until the programming is. And the programming is not something I control. It is something I hope, design for, and ultimately have to hand over. The measure of a project I am looking at most closely these days is whether the people who inherited the hardware are imaginative enough to keep writing the software.

I would not give advice, exactly. I would tell a younger version of myself what took me twenty-five years to understand, which is that the thing worth protecting, across every project and every commission and every year the market tries to reduce you to a service, is the capacity to imagine. Not style. Not success. Not the next publication. The capacity itself.

We have been told, in the current moment of the world, that imagination is a luxury. Imagination is not the soft counterpart to hard reality. It is the survival technology by which societies that have exhausted their conventional options find any options at all. It is the only capacity that lets us answer a brief the world has already written by saying: what if we wrote a different one?

The advice, then, is not about architecture specifically. It is about the courage to keep imagining when the culture around you has stopped. We are living inside a moment that has traded depth for impact, ritual for entertainment, collective meaning for fleeting attention. Buildings are one of the few remaining instruments that can still carry depth, because they take time to build, time to inhabit, and time to become part of a neighborhood. Architects who understand this have a responsibility I did not fully see when I was starting out. We are keeping alive, in physical form, the possibility that humanity can still build things that mean something beyond their cost.

So what I would tell a younger architect is to insist that the buildings you make have something to give back to the people who did not commission them. To refuse the briefs that are subtractive. To build teams that outlast commissions. To hold on to the capacity to imagine when everyone around you is telling you it is impractical. That capacity, protected across decades, is what the profession is for. And bringing culture back to its depth, back to what drives humanity, which is the belief that what we build together can matter, begins with architects willing to say, one project at a time, and one refusal at a time, that imagination is not a luxury. It is the infrastructure on which everything meaningful still depends.