In the fall of 1979, I worked for a firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where on any given day, a Harvard professor might show up, to work on one of the many projects we had going on in Saudi Arabia.

One day, the principal of the firm called me into his office and asked if I had ever heard of Frank Gehry. Of course, I said. His house in Santa Monica had just been published in Progressive Architecture. Well, you’re going to be working with him, he said. As the least senior person in the office, and the most expendable, I now had the good fortune to tumble into this assignment. They put me in a third-floor garret next door to await Frank Gehry’s arrival.

Frank Gehry, who had been a successful, commercial architect up to that point, had decided to reorient his office to a studio practice. This was inspired largely by his artist friends in and around Los Angeles. He was now at a precipitous moment in his career. A group at Harvard decided to pick him up, give him a position at the school, and award him a generous commission through our firm, on one of our Middle East projects.

On his first visit to the office, he sat at a table with various materials, imagining a gate for a faraway city in the Saudi Arabian desert. He took some blocks of foam and then some crumpled yellow tracing paper, perhaps looking for the diaphanous quality of chain link, and at one point, placed the blocks speculatively on top of each other. It reminded me of a sculpture by Michael Heizer, I said. Did I know Michael Heizer? he asked. No, I said. He's a friend of mine, he announced proudly, and then, looking at me, thought, maybe this kid is not as dumb as he looks, though, then again…

Sometimes, when Frank was out of town, he would send sketches through what was then known as a Quip machine, an early version of the fax machine based on the Telex. From these sketches, I would be asked to make a rough model. Occasionally, a senior member of the office would come by to rearrange the model, perhaps under the illusion that they were participating in the design. In most cases, this was irrelevant, since all Frank wanted to see was the size and disposition of the elements of the project, so that he could begin to explore their relationship according to his own personal and idiosyncratic logic when he arrived.

This was in the days before computer-aided design. His office would later pioneer the development of computer-aided design, but for now, this type of departure from regular geometry was more than our firm could handle. Fortunately, Frank had, in his Santa Monica office, a Korean draftsman capable of constructing the most beautiful and precise construction drawings, with the assuredness of a hardened and sharp pencil. All of the early, polemic works of Frank Gehry were delineated by this draftsman's fine hand.

The large commission assigned to Frank, as part of this Harvard-Cambridge arrangement, was the design of a US Embassy in Damascus, Syria. Frank found it largely distasteful. He'd travelled to Damascus once, as part of the project, and having changed his name early in life, to avoid antisemitism, did not enjoy it. So, over time, while his name remained on the project, he increasingly had less to do with it, until in the end, it was largely designed by associates in the firm.

Another junior person in the office and I were assigned to build a model. We stayed up many nights completing the model, which sat on a large base, and late one night, were thrown into the back of a van to hold the model as we raced to the airport to deliver the model to the State Department.

The Design Review Committee for the State Department at that time was chaired by a dyed-in-the-wool Cambridge architect, the designer of crystalline works of doctrinaire modernism. He did not care for the carefree, experimental approach of this upstart Californian, and in the meeting, continued to ask why Frank insisted on breaking up the geometry. Why all the slanted walls and funny angles? Frank sat stone-faced, refusing to answer. It was McCarthy-esque.

What happened next is not entirely clear to me. I went off to graduate school. Frank broke off his association with the firm, and most likely with the whole Harvard-Cambridge cabal, and went on to develop one of the most successful practices the country, or for that matter, the world, has ever seen.

Years later, I would run into him, say, when I was teaching, and he would come to lecture. He would always come over and say hello. I'm not sure he remembered my name, but he seemed to remember me, though from where, he was probably not sure. Perhaps that was just his charm. He was always warm and friendly. However, those months of indenture in Cambridge, where he had made a deal with the Devil, were ones he now wanted to forget.

They appear nowhere in the record of his work.