When exactly does does Reinier de Graaf find time to write? He has published three books over the last six years—not bad, given that he is also a partner at OMA, one of Europe’s busiest, most respected architectural practices. His latest title, Architect, Verb, follows Four Walls and a Roof (2017)—a compelling collection of essays and diary entries about his life in architecture—and The Masterplan (2021), a surprisingly good, although occasionally cheesy, novel. Colleagues speak of his hammering away at his laptop’s keyboard on long-haul flights, somewhere out over the ocean, while everyone else sleeps. He writes and he writes, and he does it well. Perhaps more worthwhile, then, is to ask why rather than when.

As might be expected, de Graaf approaches writing from within the world of architecture, offering insight into the economic, social, and political pressures of his professional life. Although Four Walls and a Roof began this process in circumspect fashion, Architect, Verb comes out guns blazing. The book purports to be semantic in its intention—each chapter challenges a particular term or catchphrase common in the vocabulary of his colleagues, clients, and competitors. The big words that make de Graaf—a left-leaning late-boomer European—unhappy are professional terms such as “world-class” and “place-making” as well as subjective concepts, including “creativity” and “beauty.” As de Graaf argues, these words may offer architecture a set of goals, but, in fact, when codified by legislators or marketing teams, they create a system, a metric of measurement, that actually distracts from the medium itself.