"We are all Dash Marshall" says Bryan Boyer, who works for the multi-disciplinary design studio that draws its name from an imaginary figurehead. Since its founding, the firm—which in addition to Boyer, is also led by Amy Yang and Ritchie Yao—has been designing spaces large and small while also offering consulting services, working with institutions who are grappling with cultural, technological, and urban change.

We talked with the firm for our Small Studio Snapshots about how they got their start, their design philosophy, saying no to projects, and making weird renderings. 

How many people are in your practice?

Our core team is four full time and one trainee. Do dogs count? If so, add one more. Our strategy projects definitely rely on a network of other small studios that we link up with to form larger ‘Voltron’ teams. We’re starting to do something similar with our architecture projects—bringing in artists or other designers as much as possible. Recently we’ve worked with graphic designers like TwoPoints and Might, Could and artists such as Hot Tea, Kustaa Saksi, and Yoon Hyup.

Why were you originally motivated to start your own practice?

We started it by accident. Our first project was completed while working for other firms on nights, mornings, and weekends, and generally being even more overworked than your average junior architect. When we completed that project we had a little get together on site to show our friends the work. Word spread and eventually more projects came to us in enough volume that we decided to stop moonlighting and make Dash Marshall official.

Seeing this dynamic play out, we made up a figurehead that we work for. We are all Dash Marshall.

Now we all work for Dash Marshall. He’s the boss. He makes the decisions. He gets the credit, but he also takes the blame. It’s just like any other office where—despite how much they might claim to be collaborative—things are often intensely top down and the figurehead gets all the attention. We saw other offices try to avoid this phenomena with generic names such as “Office of Metropolitan Architecture” or 1,000 other vaguely official-sounding variations, but in the end there’s a great amount of pressure from the press to identify and valorize the figurehead. Seeing this dynamic play out, we made up a figurehead that we work for. We are all Dash Marshall. Everyone speaks for Dash and everyone bears the responsibility that speaking for Dash entails.

You might say there’s a certain stubbornness in the three of us who started the firm, which could be part of the reason that we were inclined to do our own thing. We stubbornly want to work in a company that is made up of people from different backgrounds, with a good gender balance, fair treatment of employees, a good sense of humor, and sane work hours.

What hurdles have you come across? 

We started the studio in the wake of the global financial crisis which affected every architect we know (including us), so we’ve been very cautious from a business perspective. One of the hurdles we’re figuring out now is how to be conservative and keep operating costs in check without being so careful that you shy away from all risk. We’re learning how to make sense of the different types of risks that come across our desk on a daily basis and to make smart choices about which ones we accept and lean into, and which we try to avoid altogether.

We think of our architecture as “form follows fable.”

We think of our architecture as “form follows fable.” Which is to say, we create architecture out of stories about how we want the world to be, as well as how we want to be in the world. We’re intensely interested in how people actually use the spaces they occupy, and we carefully dissect human behaviors to understand the interface between people and space. We identify human rituals and design out from there.

If we’re working with a client who is fixated on some traditionalist aesthetic, we’ll take that on as a challenge. If the client is more futuristic we can handle that too (and tend to gravitate towards something between the aesthetics of 1970s concept cars and Adolf Loos). You see the variety in our portfolio and hopefully you see the same level of spatial intelligence in each of the works, regardless of the fact that they look quite different on their face. But the hurdle, to get back to your question, is that we’ve found people have a hard time interpreting our work because it all looks different. We’re working on that now.

Is scaling up a goal or would you like to maintain the size of your practice?

We would like to grow to about 12 people. Enough to take on pretty significant projects, but small enough to fit into one studio. Small enough to really know everyone you work with, but still a large enough number that you can have some diversity of skill set within the team. At this rate we should be there in another 28 years before we get to a team of 12. Please check back!

What are the benefits of having your own practice? And staying small?

We’re small enough that we can say no to projects. With six mouths to feed (seven if you include Dolluh) we don’t need to take on a ton of projects just to keep the studio afloat. We still think very carefully when we turn down a project, of course, but it doesn’t take that many projects to get us to the point of stability. For anything beyond, we have the flexibility (and authority) to say no to potential projects that are not aligned with our values, involve shady characters, or just aren’t a good fit. We don’t like to say no, but we have the flexibility to do so.

If we think the best thing for a project is to make weird renderings with all of the furniture on fire, we can do that

Perhaps the thing we appreciate most about having our own practice is the ability to work without pretense. We can pursue work to the best of our ability without worrying about the distractions that often exist at bigger studios (no corporate ladder, no internal battles between lead architects, none of that baloney). If we think the best thing for a project is to make weird renderings with all of the furniture on fire, we can do that. If we think the best thing for our office is to make sure our team is 50/50 split between male/female, we can do that. If we want to work all night long on getting just the right staircase drawn into our plans, we can—but we usually don’t need to.

Running your own office guarantees your right to two things: to create exactly the working culture that you want, and to worry about it all the time.