One of the most persistent dichotomies in architecture is that of the corporate firm—the SOMs and AECOMs of the world—as opposed to the boutique or artisanal high-architectural practice. In architectural mythology, the corporate firm takes on a decidedly negative role. It is often believed that corporate firms work on equally corporate headquarters and airports, while boutique firms work on form-bending explorations, on sensitive small projects, or in academic and activist-type roles. Corporate firms are typically portrayed as soulless, mind-numbing, stratified CAD-monkey pens, while boutique firms are hailed as the places where real architecture happens.
There’s a subtle kind of elitism in play here, as though working on an airport is a lesser architectural task, or a more unsatisfying source of inquiry, than the Serpentine Pavilion. One cannot simply write off such a huge swath of the architectural world as boring, and its practitioners as mere office drones. And yet, the stereotype persists.
The reality is, of course, more nuanced. While large firms employ a staggering number of people working in architecture, what they do and how they work is often poorly understood in architectural discourse. Rather than being places where creative dreams go to die, corporate firms are important in understanding how, exactly, architecture works—within offices, but also economically and structurally.
What popular conceptions about big practices are fact, and what ones are fiction? Even I wasn’t sure. So I decided to launch my own inquiry on the matter, and selected Gensler’s Chicago office (which employs 250 of its more than 6,000 global employees, and that is located in my backyard) as a case study.
Problematic for our putative dichotomy is the fact that corporate firms contain multitudes. The projects that an office such as Gensler Chicago takes on are at wildly different scales and for wildly different clients, and often a given architect is involved in a variety of these efforts. One of the architects I interviewed there, a senior associate named Sean McGuire, works mostly on a few small- to medium-size projects simultaneously. Currently these include a series of homeless shelters for a nonprofit and a local union headquarters; neither is aesthetically or programmatically soulless and both arguably create value in society.
McGuire told me that, before those assignments, he worked on a new airport Gensler is designing in Columbus, Ohio, but only for one phase of the project. Here, McGuire made an important point. “People think ‘megaproject,’ and have only negative connotations: ten years of drudgery,” he said. “But you can find a lot of meaning in big projects and carve out design studies where you can do some really positive work that will affect a lot of people for a long time.” He offered an example: “Think about the person who designs the bathrooms in an airport. How many people go into a bathroom in an airport in a year? Millions. If you can practice excellent design in an airport bathroom, you’re gonna touch so many more people than doing some sexy, billion-dollar house.”
Scale and diversity of projects are integral to how big firms work and make money. Their small and medium-size projects require a design process that’s intimate and direct with clients, just like it would be for a small firm doing similar projects. The difference is that a firm like Gensler takes on multiple projects at once, so the way it metes out work is very different from how a small firm does so, where one or just a handful of people are responsible for every part of the process, for better or worse.
Combine that with something with the scale and complexity of a massive project such as an airport—all within one firm—and this necessitates managers. The question as to why corporate structures exist in architecture in the first place is partially answered by these problems of complexity, which may seem obvious but that are frequently overlooked in common perceptions of a corporate practice.
Gensler, like many corporations, had its origins in the midcentury, when corporate hierarchies developed in order to manage capital, cash flow, sales, and logistics on a newly international scale. This was made possible by advances like the jet engine (and the airline) and ever-improving systems of information technology. As production became more globalized, these systems grew even more complex, and the subsequent rise of the so-called “managerial class” is a reflection of that complexity.
Gensler, like other heavyweights, simply would not function without managers. Brian Vitale, a managing director of the Chicago office, informed me that part of why this system works for Gensler is that it promotes the majority of its managers from its own ranks of architects, who are familiar with architectural problems, rather than relying on outside consultancy.
Also like a midcentury corporation, Gensler practices a form of what is sometimes called “corporate paternalism.” Gensler, rather uniquely, is an employee-owned company. That corporate structure allows many opportunities for upward advancement and employees are retained largely by way of attractive benefits including generous maternity and paternity leave and paid overtime.
Historically, such practices have been bulwarks against unionization and labor unrest at the white-collar level. This strategy is highly effective, though such stability is undermined by the uncomfortable truth that, without labor protections, these kinds of benefits can be easily whittled away, a common trend as firms around the world look toward leanness and decentralization. Architecture, like all facets of real estate, is also particularly vulnerable to the rise and fall of economic markets and, regardless of firm size, layoffs amid downturns during which fewer projects are started are not uncommon.
Yet a workplace like Gensler provides another angle worth exploring in the debate around labor in architecture where many firms—especially academic ones such as SO — IL, which came under fire last year for advertising jobs with high entry requirements for paltry salaries—rely on much more explicit forms of exploitation. Those may include instances where architects are asked to subjugate themselves to unpaid internships, long hours, and poor wages in the service of the greater good, of either the project or of architecture itself. (SO — IL, interestingly enough, also chose to employ a profit-sharing scheme after the backlash from its job posting.) Regardless, in the present model of work in architecture, without unionization or widespread labor protections of any kind, a corporate job, ironically, is probably one of the most attractive on offer.
What’s more, corporate firms offer opportunities to expand our notions of what architectural work consists of and how that work interfaces with broader systems. While almost all the managers at Gensler are architects, the firm employs a great deal of other types of non-architect workers. One of the most interesting discoveries from my research was the revelation that corporate firms, again rather than relying on consultancy, bring many outside roles in-house. Many of these jobs shed light on under-theorized aspects of architecture.
For example, Gensler has its own legal teams in every region. There is much research to be done regarding the role litigiousness plays in architectural practice, but some examples are fairly explicit. Gensler will notdesign single-family residences, presumably because individual owners tend to be more trigger happy when it comes to lawsuits. McGuire, the firm’s senior associate, told me that Gensler refuses to build prisons (on ethical as well as legal grounds). The types of practice areas the firm takes on expands as it secures expertise that is able to support the specific needs and challenges associated with those typologies.
In addition to lawyers, Gensler employs in-house branding strategists who work with clients on developing wayfinding and coordinating branded spaces, as well as real estate analysts who work on everything from market research to post-occupancy studies. Both positions reveal the diversity of roles necessary in making buildings profitably in our era of real estate financialization and a cultural hyperawareness of branding. How such employees and their processes alter or inform architectural form and practice is worth further investigation.
Ultimately, my attempt to bust the myths of corporate firms left me asking more questions than debunking stereotypes. On the one hand, the corporate firm is not devoid of nuance nor is it totally alienated from the intimate processes of design at various scales. It’s not, all things considered, the worst kind of work in architecture.
On the other hand, the corporate firm is, well, corporate. Sometimes that’s a good thing, such as when responsible managers familiar with the problems of architecture make sure that work is effectively allocated and that architects spend more time making architecture than dealing with logistics and accounting—something both McGuire and Vitale credited with avoiding burnout and excessive overtime. Sometimes that corporate structure exists to mediate capital-labor relations. Sometimes it can reveal the decidedly capitalist and collective enterprise that architecture actually is—something that gets obscured in the cases of more boutique firms associated with a famous, genius figurehead.
“Faceless corporation” is a double-edged term in a field in which sometimes the faces are the problem. To return to capitalism, within their historical context these corporate management structures and employee retention tactics are born from a Taylorist desire for ultimate efficiency, and use a carrot-and-stick approach to keeping things running as smoothly as possible in order to make a profit—which Gensler does to the tune of $1.84 billion in global revenue per year.
This is not to say, however, that the scale of this operation makes for a somehow lesser architecture, and that, I think, is the myth most worth busting, because it invalidates the work so many architects devote their careers to.
The work Gensler puts out can at times be very lovely. This is especially true (contrary to the big-firm stereotype) on the small scale. A favorite project of mine is the Tied House, an addition to Chicago’s iconic Schubas Tavern, which makes very clever work of communicating using pattern and material—in this case, brick—with the original 19th-century Schlitz building, an icon of the city’s bar culture. A similar prowess is shown in the inviting, sensitively detailed The Hub at Prairie Shores in Bronzeville, on Chicago’s South Side.
As McGuire noted, corporate work also offers opportunities to solve complex, if everyday, problems, and contributes to buildings that impact innumerable people on a daily basis. For a critic, especially one interested in questions of how architecture works and how architects work in architecture, the corporate firm provides one of the richest cross-sections of those questions.