Every aspiring architect dreams of a breakthrough project that will establish his or her name soon enough to buy time and offset the geological pace of a creative process often calculated in decades rather than years.

But as the career tangents of even the most admired architects demonstrate, initial acclaim doesn’t come with a lifetime guarantee. When Charles Gwathmey died this summer at 71 — scandalously soon for anyone these days, architect or not — more than one observer noted that nothing he did surpassed his brilliant debut: the widely praised Long Island house and artist’s studio he designed for his parents more than four decades ago.