Start with WHY?

"The overall effect is to move smoothly from big ideas at the grand scale (What about a skyscraper twisted like licorice?) to increasingly fine-grained details (How do we design this window?)"

Gehry’s team spent two years thinking through and simulating every detail, in effect building the museum on computers before they built it in reality.
Solving this puzzle would have been impossible without CATIA, a computer-modeling technology modified from software originally created to design aircraft by the French aerospace giant Dassault Systèmes. Gehry recognized long before most that if computer modeling were pushed to extremes, it could revolutionize design and construction by allowing architects to engage in relentless iteration and testing of every imaginable form, including curves that had once been impossible to build reliably.
The result would be digital models that precisely mimicked the future building, providing exquisitely detailed plans that could be used by everyone from manufacturers to builders to operators. Starting with the Golden Fish sculpture designed for the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, digital models have been key to all of Gehry’s designs, long before anyone came up with the term #digitaltwin.

...“That’s why the model-making thing is great, because they can see it as we develop it, and understand what I’m agonizing about.” Gehry is seldom perfectly happy with anything. “I’m very open about that,” he says, and he frankly shares what he likes and what he doesn’t. He wants the same candor from the client, and when he gets it, he listens intently and synthesizes the client’s thinking into his own. “They see they’re involved,” Gehry says. “They’re invited into my thinking process. So they can see stuff. And they can say, ‘Oh no, I would never do that.’ They can feel like part of it. They see the evolution. I find that very powerful.”

At key stages, when the project must commit to design decisions before work advances, the client must give approval. In this way, the design is enriched and strengthened by the client’s perspective, while the meeting of minds that begins the project continues, iteration after iteration, following the maxim, “Try, learn, again.”

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