People assume that a studio stays small because it has not yet succeeded at getting large. Every so often someone asks, kindly, when we plan to “grow” — as though the current arrangement were a chrysalis. I have thought about this question for a long time, and my answer has settled into something firmer than modesty. Staying small is not what happened to us. It is what we chose.
The trade you are actually making
Size buys capacity. A large firm can pursue many commissions at once, absorb a bad year, and put a dozen specialists on a single problem. Those are not small advantages, and I do not pretend otherwise.
But size also buys distance. As a practice grows, the person whose judgment the client hired spends less and less time actually exercising that judgment. The work is delegated down through a structure, and the original sensibility thins with each hand it passes through. What you gain in reach you tend to lose in control — not control over people, but control over the thousand small decisions that are the difference between a competent building and a considered one.
I would rather do fewer things and still recognize my own hand in all of them.
Small does not mean isolated
The misunderstanding I most want to correct is that a small studio is a limited one. In practice it is the opposite. Because we are not carrying a large permanent staff, we are free to assemble exactly the right people for each project and no one we do not need.
For a museum we might work with a lighting designer we trust and a local architect who knows the ground. For a school in another region, an entirely different constellation — a structural engineer with a feel for local materials, an artisan whose craft becomes the building’s signature, sometimes an academic whose research shapes the whole approach. These are not subcontractors filling gaps in an org chart. They are chosen collaborators, and the studio is really the relationships more than the room.
- We can work across countries because we are light enough to move.
- We can work across disciplines because we are not defending in-house departments that need to be kept busy.
- We can say no, which is the most underrated freedom in practice.
Trust is easier to keep than to scale
A client who hires a small studio is hiring specific people, and they know it. That clarity is worth a great deal. There is no anxiety about being handed off to a junior team after the pitch, no wondering whose work they are actually getting. The person who made the promise is the person in the room when it is kept.
Continuity is the quiet luxury of a lean team. The same few minds hold the whole arc of a project, from the first uncertain sketch to the last detail on site. Nothing important has to be re-explained, because nothing important was ever delegated away. When something goes wrong — and on every real project something does — the client is talking to someone who has carried the design from the beginning and has the standing to fix it.
When it might make sense to grow
I am not dogmatic. There are reasons a studio should add people: a body of work that consistently demands a skill you keep renting, a collaborator so essential that they belong inside rather than beside the practice, or simply the wish to give talented younger architects a place to build a career.
But growth should answer a question the work is actually asking, not a question about status or scale. The moment you add people to look more like a firm rather than to make better buildings, you have started trading away the very thing that made the studio worth keeping small. So far, the work has not asked. Until it does, I am content to stay exactly this size — and to consider it a form of ambition rather than a lack of one.