Architecture is a notoriously slow profession. Mastering all the elements that go into designing a building — scale and context, material and form, the structure needed to hold the building up — takes a lifetime. And clients investing millions of dollars in a project tend to feel safer around someone with a little gray around the temples.

But even given all that, the pace of Neil Denari’s career seems excruciatingly slow. This architect, born in Texas, who founded his firm in 1988, has been a prominent figure in architectural circles since the late 1990s, when he was director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, an offbeat school that was a center of experimentation. Since then, although he has remained a prominent academic — he is now a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles — he has done only a handful of small additions and renovations. He has never produced a free-standing building.