The architect in the title is the author, who traces how his perception of shape grammars evolved over 50 years. His particular focus is emergence and its role in the embed-fuse cycle. It allows us to describe, purely by graphical means, the way designers derive shapes from shapes. This is a great advantage because shapes cannot be described, at a sufficient level of detail, using words and as a consequence, the operations on shapes designers perform can also not be described effectively with words. The embed-fuse cycle pulls these operations out of the nebulous realm of “designer’s intuition” and makes them intelligible as a form of reasoning on a par with reasoning using language—there is thinking outside of language. The cycle is entirely non-deterministic, which is one of its strengths. But this can turn into a hindrance, for example, when we try to develop a shape grammar that reproduces a given corpus of visually related designs in order to elucidate the underlying design logic post festum—emergence gets in the way. A related issue arises when we compare shape grammars with the traditional notion of an architectural grammar or language, as it has been employed by architects (notably F. L. Wright) and architectural historians alike. Central to these grammars is the concept of a limited vocabulary of shapes from which a design can be built, giving it formal coherence. Shape grammars don’t usually describe such a vocabulary independently of its use, which has conceptual and practical implications.