My Blog: Just Another Architecture Blog?
Yes, maybe. But I hope it can at least tell my stories with intellectual honesty — and that someone, eventually, might actually read it.
People had been telling me to start a blog since 2014, back when there weren’t that many of them and Google still rewarded those who had one. The problem is that by nature I’m a bit of a contrarian — and lazy. On top of that, I’ve always had little time to talk about what I do and, let’s say, to do Marketing, as they call it these days. That’s why I never started a blog.
Now that it’s less fashionable, here I am.
Over the years I’ve collected thoughts in a casual, scattered way — mostly to respond to some specific need: an interview, an article for a magazine (particularly for reFRAME Magazine), a talk at some event or conference, a contribution to a publication, and finally my monograph published by AltraLinea Edizioni in 2024.
But the one thing I want anyone reading this blog — or even just skimming a few lines here and there — to know, is that I can’t stand pomposity and self promotion for its own sake. So I’ll always try to write things that are honest.
This blog is aimed above all at young architects — unfortunately, you’re already in too deep and you’ve gone and chosen this profession too — who would like to know more about what it actually means to be an architect. Maybe working on large projects, around the world.
What to expect, how projects really work, the behind-the-scenes, the problems you’ll inevitably run into. All things nobody ever told me, and that I had to learn the hard way over the years.
At its core, this blog is addressed to my younger self: thirty-odd years ago, when social media didn’t exist, smartphones weren’t a thing, and the “architecture” section on Yahoo was a single page with maybe fifty websites, updated by hand every now and then. Google didn’t exist yet either.
A brief introduction: my name is Paolo Lettieri, I’m a 52-year-old Italian architect who, while studying at the Politecnico di Milano in the 1990s, dreamed of designing great buildings — and maybe one day becoming famous. Or at the very least, of making architecture that was beautiful, useful and functional. So far I consider myself fairly satisfied with what I’ve done, and I know I’ve been lucky: I’ve designed buildings with very different functions — hospitals, schools, universities, hotels, residential buildings, towers, auditoriums, villas — in many parts of the world, working alongside and often clashing with very different cultures. And many of these projects have actually been built.
I haven’t managed, however, to build a steady network of recurring clients that would have allowed me to run a large firm on a continuous basis — the kind I used to dream about as a student. I still believe, though, that this is a profession you do because you love it, and I plan to keep doing it for as long as I can. Retirement isn’t something that interests me: most of the great architects lived long lives and worked until they simply couldn’t anymore. I hope to do the same.
Everyone who warned me when I said I wanted to study architecture was obviously right: it’s not a profession that makes you rich. And that, over time, hasn’t changed.
One last thing. I need to be honest, so I’ll come clean: to help make this blog more readable and flowing, I’ll be using artificial intelligence as a proofreader and occasionally as a sounding board. Not the way many people do it — “write me a blog”, feed it some information, and get back something vaguely nice that fills up the internet without saying anything real.
The things I’ll write about are my own stories. The things that many architects — most architects — never tell you. The AI will only help me write them better, so they reach you more directly and without unnecessary effort. Because let’s be honest: if this blog were also heavy to read on top of everything else, nobody would read it at all.
Anyway, if you’ve made it this far, thank you — and I hope you’ll come back for the next one.
