The number I can state
People ask how many projects. The honest answer, which I can state because it is mine to state: two hundred and fifty or more, at ten to twenty-five a year, since 1996.
I will not pretend that number is an archive. It is a memory with arithmetic around it. The practice's published record, the one on the work page, holds the projects that can be documented: name, type, place, year. It is a fraction of the real count, and it says so on the page. A record that claimed completeness would be lying, and a record that hid its size would be underestimating thirty years. Both temptations are refused here.
What the undocumented ones were
They were the small houses that take three months and pay one fee. The charitable work, drawn for institutions and families who had no fee to pay, because a district practice is also a civic one whether it plans to be or not. The porch redrawn for a client whose builder had already got it wrong. The facade sketch done in a meeting and built exactly as sketched, never entering any file.
Every long-practicing architect in a district has this shadow archive. It never photographs well because it was never photographed at all. It is most of the practice, and it is the part that made the practice's reputation, one small honest job at a time.
What the number does not mean
It does not mean speed. Ten to twenty-five projects a year is what one architect, working alone with his drawings and his site visits, can hold while actually supervising what he signs. The practice has stayed at eight to twelve concurrent projects on purpose, and turned down more work than it has accepted in the last few years, because the limiting resource is attention, not capacity for signatures.
It does not mean growth, in the vertical sense. The real curve of this practice is sideways: busy for thirty years, never large. I have made peace with that curve, and this journal is partly the accounting of why the sideways curve was the right one for the work.
What the number does mean
It means pattern recognition that no shorter career can buy. Two hundred and fifty buildings teach where a plan will fail before the plan exists. They teach which clients finish and which ones stop at the third drawing. They teach what a district builds, in what order, when, and for whom.
That is the actual product of the number. Not the count. The seeing.
The documented part of the record is on the work page, filterable by type and place, every entry with its own page. The story of how the first of those two hundred and fifty came to be is in The bus to Delhi.