Getting Started and Going on

For elite designers, as for other architects, a decisive choice is whether to seek employment in an already existing office and stay there or to strike out on their own (and, if so, when and with whom, since only six of the twenty-nine designers I interviewed were sole principals). From this point of view, the most basic distinction among firms is whether, having been founded by the principal or by partners, they represent entrepreneurial ventures or not. If the firm was founded by its present principals, the career of the elite designer is parallel to that of the firm and synonymous with getting it started, going, and well known. In a firm that the elite designer joins as a hired employee (no matter at what level), the identification of career and firm is in principle not as close.

Unless entry is at the partner level, the designer's career in an extant architectural firm revolves around classic organizational questions—openings "at the top," the time it takes to get to them, and the compatibility of one's professional goals with those of the firm. There are, of course, contingencies; being a talented woman when the firm needs to show openness may be one. Because of their size and security, large firms can offer better and stabler employment as well as longer career lines. Gene Kohn emphasizes, as do other large-firm principals, the policy of giving every carefully screened employee the opportunity to work in all areas, "from feasibility to design to detailing to production to supervision," but here too luck plays a part: "Some . . . happen to be in the right project at the right time; it goes ahead and they get to stay with it. Or we are very very busy and, suddenly, something comes in and one of the young people who is asked to study it does a great job and gets discovered."

At SOM-Chicago, young designers come up through the ranks as project managers and heads of studios (a concept started by Bruce Graham in 1972, the studio is a team that stays together and executes several projects, almost like a small office). What count here are the usual career assets in organizations—showing leadership, getting along, and being placed on the fast track by a senior executive. But bringing in clients of one's own (because of an impressive reputation, through well-cultivated contacts in the community, or, rarely, because of previous professional contacts) is quoted repeatedly as an obvious and almost determinant factor. In large firms that are interested in creating a reputation for design, the awards and the professional standing of talented designers can help their advancement to partnership.

Practically all architects must serve an apprenticeship in someone else's office before registration. None of the elite designers admitted to stealing

clients from their apprenticeship firms (the pattern so feared by law firms); in fact, most reported more precarious beginnings. However, they frequently found their partners in their former employers' firms. Besides acquiring experience of different levels and scope in their previous work-places, they also formed networks of acquaintances and reservoirs of good will, which turned out to be helpful in getting recommended to clients. In fact, the medium-sized entrepreneurial firms of the design elite often seem honor-bound to mentor the former professional employees who get started on their own. Indeed, turnover is expected in firms where there is little room at the top and where the charismatic designers leave few design opportunities to their associates. Yet Michael Graves points to a common experience of beginning architects when he observes that the referrals they get from their former employers, who are their seniors in the profession, tend to be for "work that is not wanted by somebody else, because the job is either insufficient in size or in some way shaky and uncertain."

Entrepreneurial beginnings are modest. Some elite designers started out "drawing in my kitchen," "in a warehouse that belonged to my partner's parents," "in a garage," or "in my apartment"; or, like Graves, they sacrificed a good part of their academic salary to rent an office while waiting for clients. It is usual for architects to moonlight while in the employ of others and not unusual to act as a small developer.

After returning from two years with the Peace Corps in Chile, Rob Quigley's seven months with a very fine San Diego firm gave him an understanding of architectural practice that hardened his resolve to go out on his own:

The kind of attitude in the drafting room was, I think, typical of most offices in the country. "Boy, you know, we could do great work in this firm if we had a great client," or . . . "if it weren't for all those building codes," or . . . "if we just had the budget to do it." Hearing this, day in and day out, I began to believe that you could not do good work unless you had a "patron of the arts" client, and once you start believing that, you are dead . And I escaped, and luckily I got a commission to do a small house, got a commission to do another small house, . . . then I put together a small investment group to do a four-unit, three-story apartment building. I acted as a general contractor because I wanted to learn from the tradesmen. That gave me enough work to go out on my own.

For employed architects, moonlighting includes not only projects too small to support an independent practice but also unpaid work, especially submissions to competitions and award programs. If nothing else, this effort keeps one alive and active in the discursive field of architecture. Placing as a finalist in a significant competition or receiving an important

award (for small-scale work or projects) may act as a trigger for the decision to start an independent practice, provided there is a supplementary source of income. Philip Johnson quips that architects either have to be born wealthy or marry into wealth and then apologizes for this "rich boy's statement"; the fact is that a spouse's income can help entrepreneurial ventures in architecture as in other businesses.^[19]

Three concepts recur in the architects' accounts of their careers: breakthrough, track record, and range. I analyze them in turn, but, first, I briefly describe their interrelations.

Architectural breakthrough refers to a phenomenon that includes the accumulation of symbolic capital—Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the legitimate authority to speak in and for the specific field where one's achievements count—although it cannot quite be measured in the same terms.^[20] Because of this profession's fundamental heteronomy, a breakthrough must necessarily confer authority on the architect in the eyes of the potential clients. After the breakthrough, an architect should ideally go from project to project, accumulating a track record (an ensemble of realized work) without suffering major interruptions. Breakthrough and track record are the fundamental building blocks of orderly careers. Range, however, is different: It refers to architects' efforts to shape their careers with relative autonomy from the market and to escape their specialized niches. By striving for range, architects implicitly resist client pressure to confine them to a limited track record.

As I hinted above, peer recognition provides confirmation of individual or collective ability, but it is seldom enough to bring the breakthrough of which designers speak. Breakthrough is a complex notion. First of all, it is highly retrospective, constructed by looking back from the vantage point of a developed career. In a sense, only an established architect can say "that was my breakthrough," as if that building had created the career that followed.^[21] It is next to impossible to know whether architects recognize breakthroughs when they happen; younger architects assess their achievements cautiously, for reversals of fortune are common and can happen quite easily.

For instance, Julie Eizenberg and her husband, Hank Koning, got a First Design Award from Progressive Architecture in 1987 for two complexes of affordable apartments built in Santa Monica. Their work was reviewed by Paul Goldberger in the New York Times, and the award helped Julie get a teaching job at the University of California, Los Angeles. On the other hand, the Santa Monica Community Corporation, Eizenberg and Koning's client, thinks they have hired them too often and would "like to spread

their work around"; Eizenberg and Koning's next project, a community services center, while big enough to put them "in another league of work," was still only "a hole in the ground" in 1989 and not yet part of their track record. Julie refused to see these considerable achievements as a "real" breakthrough.

Second, the breakthrough is tied to symbolic capital in the field. It is work that brings attention and standing in architecture: It gives the designer "presence," the status of a potential or emergent member in the eyes of the profession's elite. Presence allows strategizing behaviors and political moves in the profession's discursive field. Thus, a man as strategically placed as Michael Graves considers the remarkable project with which he won the competition for the unbuilt Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Center in 1977 as a breakthrough because it led directly to the Portland Municipal Services Building, his first major realization. His account of what happened after winning in Fargo-Moorhead with enormous expenditure of time, energy, and money, tells of the anxiousness attending architectural work:

I worked so hard to get the commission, got it, but never built a building. Now, those drawings were published everywhere. They were imaginative. It was really the first postmodern things that were published a lot . . . covers, and so on. That's not what I wanted; I wanted a building! But, from that, I was invited to give a lecture in Portland, so the net continues. . . . The AIA invited me, and Ed Wundram [the Portland competition organizer] sat next to me at dinner after the lecture, and he said: "We've got a competition going out here. . . . What do we have to do to encourage somebody like you to enter?" I said: "Ask!" I mean, "somebody like you!" He thought I was too grand, but, here again, he thought that Fargo would be built. I did too at the time. Even when it looked as though it was very shaky, you continue to think and to say to people "There's every hope that it will be built," though things are not going well, or they didn't raise the money, or they didn't pass the bond issue, or whatever it was, which is all true. Golf courses got 51 percent [of the vote] and the cultural center 40 percent. Then it was dead, but by that time we had Portland.

Professional standing and the attention of sound clients must go together in elite careers. Standing, however, is not the same as position in the field. Having attended an elite school, having met the right people, and having an effective "old boy network" can substitute for the traditional family ties of the "gentleman architect," but with two conditions. First, an architect's mentors in the field must have positions of influence and be willing to use them; second, the protégé's work cannot threaten the mentors' own professional standing. The beginner's work should bring credit to the mentors and reinforce their influence, but it should not take clients from them,

unless they have plenty to spare. Mentoring is self-reproducing: In a competitive and male profession, it tends to exclude women and other outsiders. It also tends to work against dissent, or at least against architectural challenges that cannot be contained within a market niche other than the mentor's own.

The third and most important characteristic of "real" breakthroughs is that they should insure a relatively continuous flow of work. Because clients are the crucial factor in this, breakthroughs must be important enough to elicit not only the attention but also the trust of clients. It is ultimately by the grace of clients' choices that architects constitute their track record, the compendium of experience and recognition that is the prerequisite of important architectural work.

The trajectory of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates illustrates the discrepancy that may arise between a breakthrough in the discursive field of architecture and the track record, which is the first thing a client wants to see. Fame gave a prestigious standing in the field to the Venturi Rauch Scott Brown partnership, nourishing their high expectations. But precisely because their reputation was controversial, they needed to accumulate a substantial track record to neutralize the effects of fame. Therefore, their "real" breakthrough (Wu Hall at Princeton University) took from 1964 to 1978 to come. Denise Scott Brown gives a vivid account of the tyranny of the track record:

They don't trust new young firms, that's the first thing. They don't trust firms who are not well connected in the society, which we weren't. They don't trust firms who . . . can't show buildings, and then they don't trust firms whose work they don't like the looks of. But if everyone else is saying they are marvelous and they have a whole lot of other commissions and they have a strong track record, then you feel reassured about the fact that you think it ugly. . . . Hiring us was a risk. Princeton was the seal of approval that removed the risk element for many clients. Obviously, we still don't get whole categories of clients who are not interested enough. But now we get enough who are .

Real breakthroughs and impressive track records can never eliminate the element of uncertainty from the lives of even the best entrepreneurial design firms. Their principals vividly and repeatedly refer to this uncertainty as the "roller coaster" of architectural practice. In hard times, it does not spare the large corporate firms either.^[22]

Large strong-service firms must be started too, and the time at which they do so is significant. The small partnership of Skidmore Owings Merrill was founded in the late 1930s, when there was practically no architectural work. According to the late Gordon Bunshaft, SOM's success after the war

was facilitated by the disappearance of many rivals (firms identified with the Beaux-Arts approach) in the depression. The building boom and the change in clients' taste completed a constellation of factors favorable to modernism:

We never had to sell modern. They just accepted it. . . . At one meeting we presented partial models for the exterior of Chase [the Chase Manhattan building in New York]. We had made samples of stainless steel and glass and one in aluminum; Owings thought he had to do one in granite. . . . The key man on this board was about ninety. . . . He came into the meeting before anybody, he walked up to me and he said: "What's this?" I said: "That's a granite thing." He said: "Hell, we don't want any granite today, we want a modern building!"

Kohn Pedersen Fox, one of the most visible firms of the 1980s, is a likely challenger to SOM's position as corporate design leader. Its beginnings involve a strategically planned anticipation of clients' desires. The firm started in 1976, in the middle of the recession. Gene Kohn met his partners while all three worked (Kohn as vice president) in John Warnecke's office, a large firm that was rapidly declining because Warnecke wanted neither to share power nor prepare his own succession. Kohn explored the field with the marketing and managerial acumen for which he is famous. He got the ideas of "six or seven key people about what a good firm should provide in terms of service, talent, energy." One of his contacts got him an open line of credit with Chemical Bank, which was exceptional for a new office in 1976; but there was no work to be had, "none, zero."

From July to September 1976, KPF made a breakthrough so remarkable that the bank credit was never used. Crucial to it were the extended contacts created at Warnecke's and a first commission with ABC, the media network, where Kohn and Fox knew two "key vice presidents" and to whom they offered their services for the planned renovation of an old armory. "A good interview and no competition, basically," led over fifteen years to twelve buildings, master plans, and interiors.^[23]

What mattered most to their first clients, according to Kohn, was getting three senior architects present at all the meetings and involved in all the phases of the project. After three years and a dozen buildings (three for ABC), KPF had itself become a marketing tool: A Chicago developer tried to lure ABC to a relatively risky real estate area by retaining its favorite architects. Ultimately, Pedersen produced for the developer, not for ABC, one of his most publicized designs at 333 Wacker Drive: a dark green blade of glass that curves softly along the river front with razor-sharp lines and clean massing. KPF was the first outside firm to penetrate Chicago's jealously guarded architectural preserve in the postwar period.

In sum, KPF owes its meteoric ascent during inauspicious times to Kohn's aggressive and effective marketing of an experienced architectural team distinguished by William Pedersen's brilliant design talent. Kohn says: "People have to like you, and they have to respect your talent; some other third party has to say something nice about you, and, finally, the press has to give its blessing. When those come together, they form a pyramid that points the job." But the editor of Progressive Architecture gives them more credit than that: KPF supports the now customary "contextual" approach to the urban environment by a carefully prepared architectural, social, and economic history of the place. According to John Dixon, this approach is "tremendously persuasive" for a client.

KPF is a large-scale practice with eight partners, two hundred employees, and a hundred more in Conway Associates, its separate interiors branch; at any time in the 1980s, it was working on thirty to forty projects in different stages of development; it has many "repeat" clients; it has projects overseas; it participates at a loss in competitions for different building types. But it has not yet had the breakthrough it so desires in prestigious institutional building. All the public relations, all the talent, all the care in detailing and construction, and all the concern with mobility within the firm seem insufficient to release KPF from the constraints of success within one major building type.

Strong-service firms, therefore, need their breakthroughs as much as the entrepreneurial strong-idea firms. However, there seems to be a sort of trade-off between security and variety in the constitution of the track record: Repeat clients risk locking the firm into a relatively narrow (though immensely profitable) market niche. For the corporate and the entrepreneurial firms, growth has different implications.

Since its take-off at the end of World War II, SOM has built a worldwide reputation of technical competence and excellence in the design of very large buildings for business, government, and large institutions. In the 1980s, it has tried to diversify an approach too closely identified with the modernism of the 1960s, enraging its retired partner Gordon Bunshaft, a fierce gatekeeper of modernism against the postmodern challenge.^[24] Bruce Graham, the powerful senior partner at SOM-Chicago, has recently started to collaborate with elite designers such as Charles Moore, Frank Gehry, Venturi Rauch Scott Brown, and Stanley Tigerman. These designers see this as a welcome attempt by SOM to spruce up its design reputation, an action that might spread large-scale work around. Graham implicitly contrasts the entrepreneurs' "roller coaster" with the stability due to his own firm's size and internal organization, which he sees as requirements for

securing work: "It's harder for them. Frank [Gehry] does not like to have more than twenty-four people, so he can't keep a backlog of things. He can't move those people into the next phase while he gets involved into the next phase. If he had three studios, he would be able to do that better." Gehry might respond with what he told me: "Thirty people is the absolute limit here. We won't hire the thirty-first, so that means we have to choose the jobs, and it is hard." Yet his complaint that corporate clients who are courting him want him "to be SOM" lends indirect support to Graham's diagnosis:

If they come in with a senior vice president in charge of real estate and . . . a junior real estate division manager, they would like the office to have their kind of parts, so that one can meet with that one. . . . It's almost like putting a key in a lock! When they come here, they don't know how they're going to fit. I think the president, the boss, usually can relate to me if I just spend time with them, but the lower levels have trouble with this. . . . They want that fit!

Although size is a sign of success and organizational health, it appears to be a recurrent concern in the growing entrepreneurial elite firm. A corporate architect like Graham implicitly takes size as the counterpart of good organization, but entrepreneurial design principals mention size almost apologetically. They are well aware of the old architecture school notion that one architect cannot supervise more than five others. Their prominence in the field matches in many cases the studio set-up of their offices, run by the master as an old-fashioned atelier. Obviously, the larger the size, the more difficult it is to preserve this atmosphere.

Most strong-idea firms cultivate an informal appearance: renovated lofts; art books and models lying around; the occasional piece of very fine art or the master's own creations (in Gehry's office, his fish-shaped lamp and paper furniture); open drafting rooms never too far from the principal's office. As an example of this last item, Robert Stern's office is one of elegant simplicity carved out of the huge drafting rooms (an oval room with no doors, separated by large arches from a corridor with the loft's glass wall on one side and the entrance hall on the other). The atelier atmosphere, reminiscent of art schools, is one of the nonmaterial rewards for always underpaid professional workers.

Elite entrepreneurial architects often engage in the ideological masking typical of the sellers of symbolic goods. As Pierre Bourdieu observes, "the vendor deceives the customer only insofar as he deceives himself and is sincerely sold on the value of what he sells."^[25] These architects see in large size both a cause and a symptom of the transformation of architecture from "a way of life" into "a means of livelihood." Yet, when the "roller coaster"

is down, it is clear what comes first: Employees are reluctantly but no less relentlessly let go.

Some elite firms admit to having a stable core of partners (not all of whom design), experienced project captains, and technical people, around which revolves a larger professional staff expected to move on after a few years—the justification being that the best people have the ambition to leave in order "to do their own architecture." Yet managing partners of entrepreneurial design firms recognize that they do not provide good technical training to their professional employees. Instead, they depend on preexisting technical competence, acquired by their staff in "firms that do not get published" or in those that do. SOM, in particular, has the reputation of a graduate school in practical construction skills.^[26]

Robert Stern Associates, with one hundred people in its employ, has acceded to the status of large firm, although the looks of Stern's office reveal a reluctance to identify with a straight "corporate" practice. Stern says he is the first to be surprised, since he thought for so long that his teacher Paul Rudolph's "ideal office size"—twenty people—was a lot. He justifies the course he has taken by invoking a modified but "natural" model of career development:

I imagined I would have the kind of career that Rudolph before me had had . . . if you use Rudolph as a model, small houses in Sarasota, and then he got Leslie College and suddenly New Haven parking garages and architecture buildings and then big office complexes for IBM. . . . But setting up practice in 1969 with all hell breaking loose and then a declining economy! . . . When you have a five-hundred-men office and it gets cut back to two hundred, it's one thing, but when you have a three-men office and it gets cut back, it's pretty terrible. . . . I suppose I am getting the kinds of projects I imagined I would have had fifteen years ago, but also large projects for developers. Let's face it, being trained in my generation at a place like Yale, developers were not even imagined as possible clients for a good architect.^[27]

Stanley Tigerman, Stern's friend and former classmate at Yale, has a thirty-person firm in partnership with Margaret McCurry, his wife. Tigerman is convinced that supporting a larger firm than that is "like feeding a big animal": You need to get more and more work to "feed it and feed it and then, what's next? You!"

In sum, size is determined by the uncertainty of architectural practice, and it becomes an important element in the designer's ideology. Tigerman, like Gehry and many architects of the entrepreneurial elite, believes that big firms change the nature of architecture from a profession that believes in good craftmanship and the free play of fantasy into something that is "like going to work for IBM. IBM, SOM, it's the same."

Bruce Graham would dispute that his firm is "like IBM." It has much less regimentation than the New York office had under Gordon Bunshaft, Graham says. His own goal in organizing SOM-Chicago "was to design firms that could build cities [emphasis added], and big pyramidal organizations won't be able to do that because the heirs become assistants and they soon die, the firm dies. . . . You don't build cities in your lifetime, you build them in milleniums." "Building cities" (standing for large-scale planning and even infrastructural design) is, in fact, a practical part of SOM's diversification strategy. But it is also an ideological notion by which Graham implicitly counters the new superiority of the smaller strong-idea firms in designing "beautiful buildings." Other designers of corporate towers mention large-scale architecture as if it were the same as urban design, as if the sheer amount of urban land and sky their buildings cover produced "cities" by accretion. Graham, however, is clear about what he means. He chairs the Chicago Central Area Committee, "the most powerful business group," a position he owes to being both an important executive and an architect. Yet he only mentions the latter, contrasting the real power of Chicago architects with New Yorkers' mere influence. For him, "building cities" is a function of power.

SOM is the very model of a firm closely integrated with the capitalist firms it serves. Its clients, its projects, and its practice are definitely more secure than those of most entrepreneurial architects. It has offices in Chicago, New York, Washington, San Francisco, and London. It is a large partnership with internal career lines and a definite policy of not hiring partners from outside. Senior partners can deal as equals with their powerful clients, for the partners are backed by organizations and influence comparable to those of their clients. The organization's internal labor pool takes care of succession, and the continuity of the firm is not a problem; competitiveness is, however. This involves being concerned with "new blood," or new design ideas.^[28]

The next chapter will show that design work at the partner level is not essentially different from that in smaller firms, only better supported by organization and technology. Yet design reputation in large comprehensive firms is a collective attribute. As Gerald Horn of Holabird and Root notes, "in a large firm, it's really the firm that they are hiring; only occasionally they'll name a person."

In architecture, as in the law, sophisticated corporate clients tend to push the firms that provide them with professional services toward the organizational form that they, as clients, find most reliable. The market of services thus comes to consist of distinct niches. Robert Gutman observes:

Each niche or segment is made up of clients with particular needs and architectural offices that attempt to serve these needs. . . . Fragmentation within the profession is a condition that clients help to generate and are probably interested in preserving. Architectural firms also find it to their advantage to preserve the pattern, at least once they have succeeded in understanding it and mastering its implications.^[29]

Yet, as we have seen, architects with design ambitions emphasize peer recognition, breakthrough, and track record, regardless of the type of firm in which they work. Therefore, the organizational distinction between entrepreneurial ventures and large corporate firms (like the overlapping division between strong-idea and strong-service firms) must be corrected. In terms of design, the kind of symbolic capital that each type of firm (and each firm) accumulates makes a difference.

The examples of SOM and KPF suggest that a firm's age connects its symbolic capital to the evolution of architectural design. A firm like SOM is old enough to have built a diversified track record at a time when the relative uniformity of the modernist language helped both the firm and its individual designers pass from one building type to another. After all, museums, libraries, Air Force academies, and office buildings did not have to look all that different. Today, SOM looks to renew itself by opening its design gradient to new, albeit not too audacious, experiments.

The pluralism of styles of the postmodern period seems to tie new service firms with design ambitions more tightly to their track record (namely, the large commercial projects to which every large firm must give primacy for economic reasons). Savvy clients in search of product differentiation "demonstrate time and time again a high degree of openness to new approaches and new faces," as the repeated use of competitions demonstrates.^[30] Regardless of the size or the nature of the project, such clients can push design architects (or strong-idea firms) to work in association with strong-delivery firms, turning for novel ideas to entrepreneurial designers, whose names rest on uniqueness, variety, and innovation.