Design Practice / Practice design

Abstract

The strategy, mission, and organization of architecture firms – here loosely defined as organizations that produce designs – have profound impacts on the outcome of the built environment. Because contemporary building practices require collaboration between multiple parties over long periods, how these actors are brought together and organized to realize building designs inevitably affect the results. Therefore, the architecture produced by these practices bears the marks of their makers: different models of service delivery, capital structures, and organizational strategies of firms inevitably influence the architecture they produce. This thesis surveys the spectrum of contemporary architecture firms and the business models through which they render their services and proposes a new model of architectural practice by synthesizing emergent models and ideas. First, the project dissects a wide range of firms from boutique startups to multinational conglomerates; then, a prototypical practice is proposed fusing attributes from these firms; finally, an architectural “product” of the firm is imagined and deployed to multiple sites, completing a closed loop connecting the business of the firm to its work.