Caspar David Friedrich. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818.

Striking it on your own can be an exhilarating process, the ability to take on your own clients, building your imagination and growing your own company. While your mind will jump immediately to the successes of your own company, learning the nuances of the nuts and bolts is just as if not more critical of launching your own design office. Looking through our Small Studio Snapshots, we look to highlight the reasons, decisions, and motivations from some of today's young, successful and productive offices.

The glow of your studio desk is gone; the endless hours listening to faculty are over; the extensive jury reviews which attempt to frame your project in historical themes through jargon are finished. Once the studio reviews end, final projects are submitted, and diplomas are administered, the next steps in the profession of architecture can be daunting. 

What was once a field of endless, varied opportunities on a semester rotation, is now a clean slate with decisions left entirely to you to formulate, decide, and chase. With syllabi gone and projects now left to your own discovery, with feedback and value finding form in cost and revisions, the professional world post-graduation can be an unexpected reality check for many design offices. 

Deciding on which path to take, whether it be working at a firm, going solo, partnering up, taking an unconventional way or going freelance, are among the possibilities when one first looks at the approaching horizon of the profession. 

When we graduate and move out of the educational realm, the world of opportunity seems endless and yet, deciding to embark on such a journey on your own terms brings a new level of exhilaration with equal parts anxiety. Does one continue on the threads of their thesis? Does one shift gears and partner up with a colleague or friend? Tackling the professional world from the start is one reminiscent of a fairy tale but can be filled with endless bumps, surprises, and payoffs. Being true to your motivations, reasons, and inclinations is a critical element of starting off on the right foot and also different in every case. 

With syllabi gone and projects now left to your own discovery and feedback and value finding form in cost and revisions, the world of the profession post-graduation can be a field of an unexpected reality check...

Every studio—every architect—has a story, a reason, and a journey up onto itself. The first step of any adventure is deciding to make the journey: discovering that moment when you decide to take the risk and set out on putting yourself out there. Striking out on your own is daunting. But, if there is one thing you need above all it is desire, patience, and maybe a little sense of adventure. 

Declaring your place in the profession, creating your center of creativity—whether it be on your own or with partners—is just the first step in a plethora of decisions to come. What then, have been the reasons of some of today's successful emerging studios? What chance encounters, what coincidences or planned paths have been the reasons for successful practitioners to strike it out on their own? Below, are a series of selected quotes of such ideas, moments and projects that have formed the backbones for today's studios to embark on such a journey. 

Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers of Dream the Combine

We started working together informally in 2011 on Space Destroyer, a speculative project for the NYC subway that was exhibited at the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas for the New City. A year later, we decided to return to Jennifer’s hometown of Minneapolis. We started Dream The Combine in January 2013, just over five years ago.

We initially took on a wide variety of projects: from graphic design for a global consortium of scholars, to planning for a local school serving underrepresented students, to partnering with an architect in Vancouver, BC on the design of a 40-story residential tower. We moved to Canada for the latter, returning to Minneapolis in 2016. 

While we were doing this client-driven design work, we were also making public art installations that have become the core of our practice. These build off of earlier interests in metaphor, figure/ground relationships, and cultural theory.

Jaffer Kolb and Ivi Diamantopoulou of New Affiliates

We love to argue, and disagree often. Critiquing one another has informed and bettered both of our independent work for years and we saw starting a practice as a platform to test this productive friction. It was important to us to do this as an office, with projects both real and large; interacting with clients; dealing with lawyers and accountants and insurances of many kinds. In other words, to dive fully into practice as a new space for our arguments and a new site to explore the commingling of different sensibilities. We’d like to think that this model has repercussions in parts of our work that are otherwise totally conceptual and theoretical.

Alfie Koetter and Emmett Zeifman of Medium Office

We never seriously considered an alternative. While we each worked for a relatively brief time in offices, we were fortunate to find opportunities to teach full time, which allowed us to devote more time to our own work and to begin to build a practice without facing immediate financial pressure.

Clark Thenhaus of Endemic

The original motivations were actually pretty simple: I was compelled to contribute ideas to the field of architecture, and I desired the burden of choice for how to work on them. Whereas the motivations for doing this were relatively simple—to contribute—it was everything after that that was complicated. The immediate next step was trying to figure out what 'practice' meant. When Endemic was started, the idea of practice was motivated by a desire to contribute to the discipline in some way through teaching, speculative ideas, representation, or conceptual writing's and things like feasibility studies, side yard setbacks, or contracts and so on meant very little to the production of the earlier ideas. Eventually, the production of ideas began to fall in conflict with the contingencies of the small amount of real work that I did have. More recently, however, these two have come into closer proximity with one another, and so the original motivations still feel relevant but with a bit more awareness and an increasing ability to see them realized.

Bryony Roberts of Bryony Roberts Studio

After grad school and after working in offices, I saw that the kind of work I wanted to do didn’t fit into normal categories of architecture practice. I wanted to combine methods from social practice, art, preservation, and architecture, and I knew I’d have to figure out on my own how to do that. 

Anda and Jenny French of French 2D

Our creative process works better when we have a degree of autonomy. Internally that means that we can be more vulnerable in our working methods and allow ourselves to be free of hierarchical judgment – in many ways we are more art collective than traditional architectural firm. Externally, this makes the design process more fluid and we can better collaborate or pivot with our clients on the spot.

Erin Cuevas and Jana Masset Collatz of Curious Minds LA

For us, the greatest benefits are having control over our own design agenda and the ability to pursue projects that inspire us.  Being excited about the work we’re doing is our primary source of motivation. Additionally, we’re committed to developing the set of values by which we run our practice, and we’ve enjoyed working through this as our office begins to grow.  

We both appreciate having a flexible schedule, being able to work remotely and allocate time for teaching, passion projects, and family. The one benefit of starting our own practice that has exceeded our expectations is the growth of our partnership. We’ve learned how to lean on each other through difficult moments, not only in the office but also in other parts of life.  

Chloe Brunner, Dingliang Yang and Yaohua Wang of Preliminary Research Office

It’s probably a shared dream for architects to have their own offices. We figured if that’s what we want to do, we might as well start early, while we can still afford to make mistakes and are not yet treated too seriously. For us, not being treated too seriously is a treat which gives us room to wonder and mingle.

Elizabeth Timme & Helen Leung of LA-Más

(Elizabeth) I co-founded LA Más with Mia Lehrer (a landscape architect) in 2012 after returning from practicing abroad and wanting to invest in the city I grew up in, Los Angeles. Also, although LA has had many great rebellious acts of architecture, I didn’t really see many firms taking the role of activists when lobbying for more progressive planning solutions. As progressive as LA is, designers still seemed relegated to the sidelines, coming into big development projects once a vision was set. We wanted to drive that vision and do it in partnership with communities.

Igor Bragado and Miles Gertler of Common Accounts

It started very naturally at the Princeton School of Architecture. Our joint thesis research got the attention of a few of our professors who were at the time directing two biennales: one in Istanbul, the other in Seoul. We expanded and tested our thesis in those two venues. To this day, much of the work we are doing is still an extension of our thesis.

If we have to pinpoint a starting moment, that would be when we first asked for an interview while we were still at school. The writer asked us for our office's name and a few hours later, we had a placeholder website. 

Oh, and Horoscope.com would have us believe that, "Aries gives Leo the assertiveness to charge ahead and take chances, while Leo can help teach Aries to stabilize and follow things through. Aries may sometimes hurt Leo’s feelings by saying something hurtful without thinking. Conversely, Aries may be irritated by Leo’s bossy nature and tendency to sulk. But they’re both loyal and care about each other deeply, and when they can understand there doesn’t have to be a boss, their relationship can be exciting bliss." So with that in mind it all seems rather inescapable.

What will your reason be? 

Whatever your reason or moment is, taking the jump to start a firm is an adventure filled with ups, downs and inquiry. Having the first frame of mind and level of curiosity will only make the journey exhilarating.