By Clifford A. Pearson

Many of the architects in this year’s Design Vanguard are blurring old notions of practice and geography. Instead of having one office in one place, several of this year’s firms operate from multiple locations, even though they have few employees. The network, not the centralized headquarters, serves as the operational model.

With the Internet, not the blueprint, now the key medium of dissemination, new kinds of organization are emerging among young architectural firms. The four principals at servo live in four different cities (New York, Los Angeles, Stockholm, and Zurich). Thomas Spiegelhalter teaches in Los Angeles but works on projects in the U.S. and Germany. heneghan.peng moved its office from New York to Dublin two years after it started and now has its biggest project in Egypt. Qingyun Ma (MADA) and Soo Chan (SCDA) earned graduate degrees and worked in the U.S. before returning to Asia to set up their firms.

Do we identify Cornell-and-Harvard-educated Shih-Fu Peng as an Irish architect because he’s a member of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland and has an office in Dublin? Is Spiegelhalter, a native of Freiburg, Germany, now part of the American team because he has worked in the U.S. for the past five years? Does nationality make any difference in a world where every architect is just a few mouse clicks away from the same publications and we all seem to dress alike?

See the December, 2003 issue of Architectural Record for complete coverage of these firms, including the full version of the essay excerpted above.

Please click on images to see photocredits.

OpenOffice | SCDA Architects | Thomas Spiegelhalter Studio
servo | Chiba Manabu Architects | Labics | MADA s.p.a.m.
Merrima Aboriginal Design | Studio for Architecture | heneghan.peng.architects