"“Once you start an office, you realize it’s not about one person,” Mr. Meredith said. “What you become responsible for is building a culture rather than doing all the work. It’s not really about you.”
Recently stumbled again onto these two articles about architecture brand-name firms. Led me to thinking about how some branded offices ended up splitting up over the past ten or so years, and the separate ventures started using their own names for their new office (for most, not all).
For example:
Office dA split into
nadaa ( Nader Tehrani)
Monica ponce de leon Studio (Monica Ponce de Leon)
PLOT split into
BIG/ Bjarke Ingels Group (Bjarke Ingels)
JDS/Julien De Smedt (Julien de Smedt)
Architecture Brand-Names. Are they over?
"Fanciful firm names have become de rigueur for young architects who want to be seen as being on the cutting edge of design:"
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/architecture/2007/11/building_a_brand.html
"“Once you start an office, you realize it’s not about one person,” Mr. Meredith said. “What you become responsible for is building a culture rather than doing all the work. It’s not really about you.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/arts/design/30name.html
Recently stumbled again onto these two articles about architecture brand-name firms. Led me to thinking about how some branded offices ended up splitting up over the past ten or so years, and the separate ventures started using their own names for their new office (for most, not all).
For example:
Office dA split into
nadaa ( Nader Tehrani)
Monica ponce de leon Studio (Monica Ponce de Leon)
PLOT split into
BIG/ Bjarke Ingels Group (Bjarke Ingels)
JDS/Julien De Smedt (Julien de Smedt)
Foreign Office Architecture split into
Farshid Moussavi Architecture (Farshid Mouseavi)
Alejandro Zaera-Polo Architecture (Alejandro Zaera-Polo)
Para Project split/ separated into
Leong Leong (Dominic Leong)
Para Project ( Jon Lott, Brian Price?)
Gnuform split into
Murmur-la (Heather Roberge)
Hirsute (Jason Payne) , both continue to use branded names.
Qua’Varch was renamed to Paul Preissner Architects.
Still waiting for Hernan to rename XEFIROTARCH.
These were just some that popped into my head. Can anyone else think of others? What do you think? Brand-named architects still relevant?
How many big egos can one office have?
As long as there are fashionability and marketing, there will be brands and branding.
Toothpaste, cars, architects, they're all products in the economic sphere, where popularity is the goal and publicity is the means.
If there is a trend, it is only for architects to drop clever monikers once their own reputations are established.
They obsess not over the content of the work, but over the name of the group.
They are the next generation, lost.
It's not an either or proposition, is it?
No. Its only a symptom of a much bigger problem.