Architecture firm culture exists in the overlap between design philosophy and working conditions, inseparable from the way work is done and the final product. Under pressure to evolve from technology that became omnipresent during the COVID-19 pandemic, and due to social and political currents that seek to monitor how leaders treat their employees, office culture is disseminated formally and informally, as a set of rules in a handbook and as a series of quietly collected observations.
There is purported widespread interest from firm leaders and employees in building a collaborative and non-hierarchical culture, but even in the most progressive settings, there is no escape from elements of culture that flow from top to bottom, sometimes for paradoxical reasons.
That’s the case for Bernheimer Architecture, which specializes in affordable housing in New York City. With a current staff of 18, the firm made history last summer as the first unionized shop in architecture, after months of negotiations and voluntary recognition by management. “Over the last two-and-a-half years, we’ve been preoccupied with firm culture,” says Founding Principal Andy Bernheimer, and in many ways this effort has coincided with his staff ’s work towards unionization. “The unionization effort was the catalyst for a lot of conversations about what kind of office this place is. A great deal of that discussion during the negotiations was subtextually about office culture, even as it was primarily about contract language.”
As this way of working has evolved, intuitively, the union contract makes work and firm culture more collaborative in some ways, but also more hierarchical—and transparent—in others. As a relatively co-equal partner with management, and with legal protections defining working conditions, union members “felt more accountable and responsible for the future of the practice,” says Ayman Rouhani, who has been an architect at Bernheimer since 2020. Autonomy—and power—within the firm enabled members to exercise agency and foresight in ways that traditional hierarchical relationships and the final, unmitigated say of management would discourage. Traditionally, most important decisions at architecture firms are made “behind closed doors, and you have no say,” Rouhani says.
This collective voice means there is more room for democratic debate and consensus, itself a radical change in culture. Many things that determine firm culture that were traditionally the province of elite decision makers are now up for debate. Early on, when the unionization effort looked to be successful, staff conducted internal surveys to determine the top issues for a contract to address, all of which were intensely connected to firm culture. These included maintaining a hybrid work model, parental leave policies, clear delineations of job responsibilities, mentorship, and professional development.
But management and labor’s contractually defined roles create a unique (for architecture) hierarchy that is likely to be more ambiguous elsewhere. Supervisory responsibilities and access to information such as financials, for example, make certain people part of management, with a distinct and legally defined set of roles and responsibilities. “That legal hierarchy has instilled a greater need for transparency,” says Bernheimer.
This includes measures that require notice periods for reductions in hours and layoffs, and an end to at-will employment. Managers must give staff a more detailed picture of the firm’s financial situation, where new work is coming from, who it’s for, and what new work leaders are pursuing.
As a specialist firm (75% of Bernheimer’s work is on affordable housing projects), aligning staff values with project types is a key driver of firm culture. This tight focus on a specific project type focuses firm culture around a progressive social mandate to improve the lives of city residents who need it most. “Just knowing our clients are working in those people’s interests makes for a positive workplace culture,” says Bernheimer.
In terms of design output, the culture of a firm is often the mediating point between broad vision and design execution, macro-scale planning and micro-level details. At Brooklyn-based design studio Civilian, culture is derived from the firm’s small size and interdisciplinary straddling. Founded in 2018 by Nicko Elliott and Ksenia Kagner, the boutique firm currently has three to four full-time staff members, with a strong focus on interiors as well as traditional architecture.
Designers there are responsible for overall design vision, but also for granular details of finishings and furnishings, and their attendant costs. “While we’re talking about lofty design ideas, spatial relationships, and form, everyone is also on the phone with the furniture vendor,” says Elliott. “We warn people they’re going to have to talk with a structural engineer about piles, and then give an opinion on what vase looks cool on a table.”
Similarly, the firm’s design culture operates at two different scales of the representation process simultaneously. “We’re all about rendering and drawing at the same time,” Elliott says. “The rendering never exists without an actual drawing of a real thing. When we push these two things, interesting things happen because a rendering can leave lots of open questions, and a detailed sketch of a thing closes them off.”
Another example of a small firm working nimbly across disciplines, Garnett.DePasquale’s firm culture prizes untangling the intimate and idiosyncratic ways that residential clients use their spaces, and translating this into tight coordination with builders and contractors in ways that makes details shine. This means bringing contractors “on board from the very beginning of the design process,” says Founder Pete DePasquale. An iterative relationship with contractors, where their perspective can influence design decisions before they are finalized, means accurately assessing costs and troubleshooting logistical hiccups in advance.
The seven-person firm, founded in 2019 and based in New York City and on Long Island, saw this approach coalesce recently with its Meadowlark House in Sag Harbor. While it was located in a historic district, the new house would not be governed by preservation restrictions, which cleared the table for their clients to do some “pretty serious Modernism,” says Co-Founder Becky Garnett. As such, the house needed to feature carefully crafted finishings that looked handmade, but were absolutely exacting in their execution. “There was a lot of math,” she says. “Your relationship with the contractor is what allows you to solve some of these on-site problems.” This relationship was “the real reason why that project sings.”
Like many architects who set out to establish their own offices after working at larger firms, Garnett and co-founder and husband Peter DePasquale thought carefully about what they had learned from culture and working styles in previous offices. From her time at Thomas Phifer and Partners, Garnett learned to interrogate each underlying component of a building intensely—like the relevant building codes—so that she could innovate on top of them. “This made for designs that were so studied and meticulous they came off as whimsical and effortless. But they were also sensible and buildable,” she says.
At the other end of the firm size scale, KPF boasts nine offices across North America, Europe, and Asia, with 600 people on staff. Given the complexity of managing the firm culture of a multi-continental design operation, leaders there are concerned with how management can best transmit a design ethos across time and space. Counterintuitively, this means de-emphasizing administrative regulation itself as an effective way to delineate culture. All firm partners, including President James von Klemperer, spend significant time designing. That’s half his workload. “I’m a little unusual for a person who says I run a firm,” he says. “I design buildings.”
This helps ensure the attention to material detail and craft that von Klemperer says is at the center of the firm’s design culture and philosophy. For the firm’s Vanderbilt Tower in Midtown Manhattan, the architects popped champagne when the client agreed to include 1,400 feet of terra-cotta spandrels travel-ing up the entire length of the building. “Getting the client to accept and under-stand the value of that measure of the building was huge,” von Klemperer says. “That’s a bit of KPF culture: caring about the large and small at the same time.”
A careful sense of material craft is part of the firm’s design DNA; firm Founder Eugene Kohn was a student of Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania. “Materials are the soul of architecture,” says von Klemperer. “l’ll spend all day or all week working on the design of some-thing that’s going to become a bronze casting.”
This design culture approach is most exemplified by the Covent Garden neighborhood in central London, developed by Capital and Counties Limited, which KPF has been involved with for 20 years. In some ways, Covent Garden is an odd choice for a firm that usually designs large, new commercial buildings and towers. This historic neighbor-hood of low-rise, three- and four-story buildings was to be surgically restored and renovated in ways that kept its charming 19th-century urban fabric intact, and amplified its presence as a retail mixed-use destination. Therefore, the scale of KPF’s inquiry focused on how material details could lend a sense of continuity to new construction and restorations. The firm decided to “spend a few months thinking about where the brick and dark metal come together,” says von Klemperer.
The result is an interstitial land-scape experience, where courtyards, streetscapes, and atria are woven together with pedestrian paths and bridges. Hidden corridors lead to interior court-yards, and historic structures are given to adaptive reuse. Subtly asymmetrical steel-framed windows (resembling the stacked crates that populated the area’s historic fruit and vegetable market) adjust the proportions of traditional architecture to-ward a modern, contemporary expression.
KPF also uses a number of formal and informal social and administrative functions to transmit this design culture philosophy. The firm hosts evening events at which staff present about speculative design concepts: the ground place in urbanism, typological studies, and geographic studies. Principals also have lunch together every week. “Everybody has to get up and sing for their lunch, and say what they have been working on,” says von Klemperer. “It’s kind of like an old-fashioned atelier: show your work.” He says collaboration beyond hierarchy is also important and, as such, principals’ offices at KPF don’t have doors and aren’t secluded, including his own.
This de-emphasis on spatial hierarchy in the office is taken further at Bernheimer. Since the pandemic, the firm has stuck to a hybrid and remote work regimen, a simple measure that can do more to tip the work-life balance dynamic (a fashionable rhetorical concession among firm leaders, if not always practiced) in favor of employees. Staffers have a physical office, but it’s rare for them to be there. “Office culture in our terms isn’t about the workplace—physically—in my estimation,” says Bernheimer. “It’s about how we work, rather than where we work.”
“There was an opportunity with COVID when everyone asked, ‘What does an office look like? What should it look like? What does being a full-time employee look like?’” says Rouhani.
Because management never mandated a return to the office, “that was one of the big signals that we were different,” he says—different enough that a unionization effort might work.
One benefit of unionization was the ability to lock in a firm culture that the staff felt was, on the whole, quite good. “We wanted to put down on paper everything that was working for us so we could have a say in what the future might look like,” says Rouhani. “Developing culture is something all of us, as part of the union, are invested in.”
ZACH MORTICE (“Building Culture”) is a Chicago-based design journalist and critic focusing on architecture and landscape architecture. His work examines the intersection of design and public policy.
