After Us
D. T. Ferrando, L. Silenzi
After Us. The work of architecture in the age of the non-
reproducibility of its author, in “Backoffice” n. 0, 15th
Venice Architecture Biennale, May 2016.
A new phase of modern celebrity history has
begun, and the shock of entry has been height-
ened by the deaths of some genuine internation-
al superstars, whose extraordinariness defied
convention and transcended the everyday.1
The death of a starchitect
No architects are mentioned in Caroline
Bainbridge’s article Why are so many celebri-
ties dying in 2016?, recently published in The
Guardian. Nevertheless, 2016 is also a mile-
stone for deaths in the architectural world, and
one can imagine that in a few years, more “gen-
uine international superstars” will abandon us
like Zaha Hadid just did, impulsing new waves
of the mediatic turmoil we have experienced
in the weeks after her death. As a matter of
fact, since news of her passing away broke,
to write about Zaha became soon redundant,
given that everyone wanted to have their say,
to leave their flower. And so the web got soon
filled up with anecdotes, memories, favorite
projects, animated gifs and celebratory videos
about the Grand Dame, most of which were
lamentable at best. Death sweeped away within
a few moments all the controversies that have
characterized the last years of her work, leaving
just choral considerations2 and attentions that
would have probably made more sense if they
had been expressed a few months before, a few
years before. In the age in which “death has
become another opportunity for public specta-
cle”3, as Bainbridge claims, the architect’s obitu-
ary seems to have gained the status of a literary
genre, to be collectively exercised on the web
and social media.
Actually, to write about Zaha in the form of
obituary implies that awkward problem of
maintaining a balance between praising and
condemning, between prizes and setbacks,
with an obvious and empathic bias towards
the first side of the scale. Furthermore: how
to discuss the death of such an important and
polarizing architect, in a moment in which the
architecture discourse tends to mitigate the
starchitect effect, while striving to focus on the
real problems architecture must address now-
adays? Some authors, when asked to put their
two cents, have tried to reconcile the political
correctness that is proper to an obituary with
the urge to remind us that there are other,
more urgent problems to deal with4, than the
death of a privileged architect who worked for
privileged clients, although the result has been
1
more or less like inviting some friends to an
argentinian restaurant and then asking them to
go vegan.
For these reasons, instead of joining the too
crowded feast, we’d rather approach the sad
event as something that gives us the oppor-
tunity to ponder on the present condition of
architectural culture, and more precisely, of
that part of architectural culture that Zaha
ended up embodying - by means of her recog-
nisable style, her globally known professional
figure and her +400 employees company, Zaha
Hadid Architects -, which is usually known as
starchitecture. Being convinced, in fact, that
her unexpected death will soon make visible
several latent processes that have been silently
reshaping the discipline in the last decades,
we’d like to establish how alive contemporary
architecture is, by speculating on the possible
consequences of the passing away of one of its
most representative specimens.
The authorship issue
Too often we - as architects, as humans - tend
to underestimate the time factor: entropy
and impermanence are inescapable issues,
to which we prefer not to think. Nothing is
eternal. We are not eternal: and architects too
are part of the game. Nevertheless, eternal
are the conditions we strive for - eternal life,
eternal happiness, eternal fame, eternal wealth
-, which is why we imbue our products with
ideals of perfection and timelessness: a meagre
compensation for our incapability of defeat-
ing what can’t be defeated. The market knows
this too well and actively feeds our appetite
for illusions, reproducing itself by means of
strategically crafted images that are meant to
capture our desire for a life beyond space and
time, while also capturing our investments.
Two birds killed with one stone that, in the
case of architectural production, takes the form
of a complex system of narratives having one of
its main cores in the starchitect figure, itself a
simulacrum made to ideally last forever - dead
or alive.
2 After Us
It is in fact proven that starchitects are quite
valuable to real estate companies, given that
signature buildings can be up to 30% more
expensive than their “generic” counterparts5.
As a consequence, most commissions signature
offices receive are intrinsically tied to the val-
ue-boosting power of their figureheads’ names,
which therefore constitute precious assets for
their clients, partners, associates, employees
and consultants (etc.). Observed from this
point of view, Zaha’s death can reasonably con-
stitute a stressful event for the builing industry,
which explains why her former company seems
more than determined6 7 to maintain her aura
well alive, albeit the unexcapable evidence of
her premature departure. Having been the first
of her kind - a world-class signature architect
- to face the ominous event, no one knows
how the market will react to it, although one
thing is sure: ZHA now needs “to tell the world
that [they are] still a viable, vibrant address
for major work of cultural importance”8, so to
reassure their current clients (the studio has at
the moment 36 works in progress around the
globe) while trying to avoid being borded up in
the long run. But how to do it, if the star - she
who provided the cultural importance of the
firm’s works - is absent?
All the biases surrounding the architecture
profession are closely connected to the way in
which it is conventionally and commonly con-
ceived. Too many people tend in fact to wrong-
ly assume that a practicing architect of the
caliber of Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry or Rem
Koolhaas (we could not say the same of Peter
Eisenman, for example, whose work has always
been research-driven rather than characterized
by the necessity to handle several international
commissions at the same time) is a maverick,
an individual creative genius, while today,
even the smaller architecture firms are turning
into collective multidisciplinary intelligences,
think-tanks far away from one-man-bands or
from any romantic individual hagiography.
There probably exist a certain threshold be-
yond which the organization of an architecture
office becomes so structured, autonomous and
powerful that it starts to transcend the indi-
viduals who founded it: a sort of evolutionary
step that is necessary for those who really want
to grow and face more interesting challenges.
Beyond that threshold, what we convention-
ally call architect changes from being a mostly
individual author to a signature powerhouse: a
Kriegsmaschine, able to handle tens (or hun-
dreds, in some cases) of projects from a single
mission-control board. Commitments of this
magnitude entail an organization that inevi-
tably tends to move away from the romantic
figure of the “creative, lonely author bent over
his/her drawings”, to become genuine, actual,
powerful and efficient creative industries9.
So the architect/author evolves from being the
individual, allnighter responsible for much
of the process to the coordinator of a team of
partners with their own specific responsibili-
ties, and eventually to the director of a board of
associates that respectively deal with the vari-
ous branches (geographical or technical) of the
office. As the boat is at sea and the office grows,
the founders/principals have to wisely manage
deferring and handing over of responsibility to
avoid the slippery risk of feeling totally indis-
pensable. They have to progressively let go of
control and help all the staff members to do
great work, while freeing up precious time for
gaining and developing new projects, living a
life and - more important - training the trusted
and independent collaborators that, when the
time comes, will wear the helm in line with the
spirit/approach/philosophy of the signature.
This happens every day, in the backstage of
the most important architecture offices in the
world, ZHA included. So it is probably accord-
ing to this spirit and to the Grand Dame will
in life that Patrik Schumacher took the reins of
the office some weeks ago.
Architects die, brands don’t
Now, some may think that the actual situation
of ZHA has a notable precedent in what hap-
pened, for example, to EMBT in 2000, when
Benedetta Tagliabue had to take the lead of the
office after the premature death of her partner,
Enric Miralles. The tragic event, in fact, hasn’t
prevented her from obtaining prestigious com-
missions and awards in the following years,
although one can easily spot the differences
between a before- and an after-Miralles, when
browsing her site. The two cases, nevertheless,
are not as similar as one may think, given that
Miralles lived and worked in a period in which
internationally known architects (with few
exceptions) hadn’t assumed yet the position
they now occupy in our collective imaginary: a
position defined by the narratives that the me-
dia - both specialistic and generic - strategical-
ly built around them. Nowadays, in fact, every
time they put their foot in the society of global-
ized spectacle, architects stop being what they
are and become what the media make them,
that is, what investment companies need them
to be: celebrities. Compared to Zaha, Miralles
and his persona wasn’t known much outside of
the architecture world. No one speculated on
the way he dressed or the dinners he attended
to. His projects spoke for himself, not the other
way around. He was no real estate icon. He was
no brand.
Which is the crucial point of the whole issue: a
point so big and evident that we have become
used to giving it for granted, while instead, we
should ask ourselves in what way architectural
culture is affected by the gigantic paradigm
shift we have assisted to in the last years, which
is the shift of the idea of the “architect with
capital A” from artist to stylist. It doesn’t mat-
ter how little artistic or authorial the work of
an architect can actually be: since the Modern
Movement, we have learnt to give architecture
names such as “the art of building”, “social art”,
“lived sculpture”, “the learned game, correct
and magnificent, of forms assembled in the
light”, etc., which are all names that summon
an artistic idea of what an architect should be.
Now, it seems that this traditionally accepted
understanding is being seriously questioned by
the way in which a small (but growing) group
3
of global architects - who are apparently going
to represent the period in which we live just as
Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe, Gropius and
Wright represent early Modernity - are shaping
their professional practices.
Unconvinced? Answer the following question:
why do we find it acceptable that in the future
ZHA will keep delivering architectures using
the same name/label, while we’d find it absurd
to visit a signature project recently completed
by, say, Atelier Mies Van der Rohe? After his
death, Picasso’s name went confined to his
works, which now document a specific period
of the history of humanity. After her death,
the name of Coco Chanel evolved into a way
of designing clothes, becoming reproducible
and therefore timeless. Still skeptical? Guess
who pronounced the following sentence: “We
feel very confident that we will carry on and
go forward with her vision and her legacy and
the experimental research she established”. A.
Yvonne Dudel, Jean Cazaubon and Philippe
Guibourge when taking over Coco Chanel’s
company after her death in 1981. B. Patrick
Schumacher a couple of weeks ago10.
If this process had already started over half a
century ago for more generalists design studios
(think for example to SOM, or Gensler, follow-
ing the path of other professional fields such as
huge law firms), the most influential interna-
tional architects - de facto niche professionals -
kept a status of artisans who personally dedi-
cated themselves to follow every single work
or research with painstaking care, sometimes
surrounded by very few partners to whom they
delegated minor issues. Although this vul-
gate is really not realistic — even the solitary
geniuses of the Renaissance had great teams of
uncredited collaborators and partners special-
ized in various, crucial aspects of the work —
only recently the major architects offices have
expanded their organisations to adapt to the
requirements of an increasingly widened and
competitive global market so to become, to all
effects, signature brands. From here comes the
author’s depersonalization in something bigger,
4 After Us
able to preserve her/his legacy - and her/his
distinctive theoretic and design principles, or
tropes - even after her/his voluntary (or unvol-
untary) retirement.
Think to the forementioned example of the
haute-couture maisons: although their found-
ers are no longer with us since quite a while,
they continue to thrive and to represent world-
wide trendsetters through the work of those
who curate and actualize with great skills their
legacy and spirit of innovation.
Louis Vuitton founded his luggage factory in
1854 and left us in 1892: despite that, the brand
has flourished during the 1900s by means of
his heirs, to become a multinational company
since 1977 under the guidance of Odile Vuit-
ton, acquiring other prestigious brands such as
Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin and activating with
Moët Hennessy a fusion in the multinational
holding company LVMH, today the worldwide
meta-brand leader boasting over 60 luxury
brands portfolio. Every creative director and
head designer of Louis Vuitton brand (recently
Marc Jacobs, replaced in 2013 by the former
Balenciaga director Nicolas Ghesquière11) has
always had the utmost care to pass on and
reinterpret the original values of the maison,
with a product portfolio that clearly recalls its
legacy, adapted and actualized to contempo-
rary taste and needs. More than 160 years since
its foundation, and more than 120 years since
the founder’s death, the Louis Vuitton brand is
now globally recognized in the fashion realm
as a vanguard beacon and an undisputed quali-
ty flagship, so as Chanel, Gucci, Dior, etc.
Is it appropriate to propose this similarity, clos-
ing the gap between fashion and architectural
design? And in case it were, will signature ar-
chitecture brands be able to produce edge-cut-
ting projects after the death of their founding
fathers? Almost twenty years ago, during an
interesting conversation with Jeffrey Kipnis
published in the issue n. 84 of “El Croquis”12,
Jacques Herzog gave some shiny assessments
in this direction. In fact, to Kipnis’ statement
that the work of the already popular Swiss
duo accelerates the feeling that architecture is
becoming like fashion, Herzog replied:
We do not mind such a comment. If someone
says it pejoratively, they underestimate the
power of fashion. Why could be fashion a bad
thing? Too much people think that contemporary
fashion, music and even art are superficial when
compared to the aspirations and responsibilities
of architecture. But we disagree. We think it is
arrogant to think in such categories… These are
practices that shape our sensibilities, they are
expressions of our times. It is not the glamourous
aspect of fashion which fascinates us. In fact we
are more interested in what people are wearing,
what they like to wrap around their bodies…
Although Herzog, by then still young, never
pushed to explicitly investigate the issues of
signature legacy, deference and the passing of
the baton, it is interesting to note that to the
next intriguing question of Kipnis - “Could you
conceive of H&DeM Architecture boutiques?” -
he replied candidly:
The idea that certain buildings or techniques,
not only ones by us but by others, could become
estabilished as standards that others use and
develop might be much healtier than the current
practice of taking a building by an influential
architect and, without actually understand it,
twisting it a little here or there to disguise the
copy, only to make it much worse.
We would not mind if some of our works - say
for example the Signal Boxes - became proto-
types. Or perhaps we could develop standards
for some of our preferred techniques such as
printing on materials or the copper bands, then
catalogue and distribute them. [...] We could
imagine exploring such ideas, though we would
want to avoid at all costs the cynical potential of
such a thought. We abhor cynicism.
We could even underline that, back then and in
spite of the feared-cynicism rethorics, the Basel
firm was subtly changing the way it presented
itself to its international audience by replacing
“Herzog & De Meuron” with the abbreviation
H&deM in every official communication or
press release: an impersonal acronym em-
phasizing a well-planned and unprecedented
signature standard in architecture, which refers
in a not too veiled way to the most renowned
international fashion brands - such as D&G, or
LV. Similarly, the Zaha Hadid firm has evolved
in recent years into the most industrious ZHA.
Hence: as powerful expressions of their time -
and also thanks to the similar and increasingly
pervasive modes in which they communicate
with the world in times of super-sharing - ar-
chitecture and fashion have been catching up
for quite a while, despite moralizing anathemas
and unfounded claims of autonomy, all con-
centrated in the first shore. And very often, the
big names in fashion have worked without any
prejudice with signature architects (so becom-
ing brands-of-brands themselves) in long-lived
and very productive partnerships, which often
led to intriguing built outcomes. In spite of
every archi-manicheanism.
But there is another open issue. Once accepted
that signature architecture studios can evolve
in actual brands, independent from their
founders, what opportunities will we have to
see again in the future buildings designed, say,
by Le Corbusier or Mies? Probably none, as not
all architecture firms are actual brands. Nor it
seems possible to reverse-engineer the creation
of “heritage brands”, at least in architecture.
Mies and Le Corbusier - unlike for example
Zaha Hadid, Foster and Partners or OMA - did
not organize their offices so to be programmat-
ically able to continue operations even after the
retirement of their founders. Still, many heirs
of the great Masters of the recent past - those
who were clever enough to make specific trade
agreements - continue to collect royalties for
furniture and design objects conceived by them
several decades ago, faithfully produced and
sold with certified signature of their respective
authors. But of course, we are talking about
5
design objects, conceived to be industrially
reproduced in an indefinite number of spec-
imens, regardless of the lifespan of their au-
thors, and we know that architecture is not yet
at this point in its evolution.
After-architecture
Now, if this is true for ZHA, we have all the
reasons to believe that something similar will
happen when the moment comes for other sig-
nature architects who, like Zaha, have tied their
names to design companies that are simply too
big to fail, giving job to hundreds of employees
distributed in several offices spread around
the globe. After all, the market does not stop.
Therefore, a basic survival instinct will prob-
ably lead to some unprecedented situations in
the field of architectural production and com-
munication, especially in those cases in which
there will be no recognisable partner to take
the lead of the company when the starchitect
disappears, like Tagliabue and Schumacher did.
A first issue to come to terms with will be that
of the name, or better, that of designing in the
name of, which as a matter of fact is what the
project leaders of big architecture firms al-
ready do since many decades, although in the
end it is rarely them who receive the credit
for it. Will the absence of those who take it all
make the invisible work of the lower steps of
the architectural pyramid become eventually
visible? Or will the names of the great founders
be also absorbed into more neutral, corporate
acronyms, such as those of many well known
international firms which are seemingly more
prepared to face this excruciating issue13? Or
will future emerging stars of the architecture
world become the new figureheads of these
offices, offering them visibility and prestige
thanks to their already recognisable names,
while preserving the legacy of those who came
before them?
And how will this legacy be understood, ap-
propriated, replicated and transformed? Today,
despite all evidences, we are still used to think-
6 After Us
ing of the work of the great Masters in terms of
“authoriality”, giving for granted the personal
and unsharable dimension of their spatial
researches - a dimension fed by the rethoric of
the creative genius that is so dear to the mar-
ket. But when the Masters’ researches will be
continued by their firms with no subtantial
change, the collaborative reality of their design
will have to be officially recognised, shifting the
discourse from personal inspiration to shared
method, from the singularity of the work to
the repdoduction of models, from the author
to its atelier, etc. Interestingly, this may lead to
the death of starchitecture as we know it, i.e., a
cultural phenomenon inextricably linked to the
cult of personality: a death that, paradoxically,
was already contained in its own genetic code,
rather than in the antagonist discourses of
those who have tried to dismantle the starchi-
tecture phenomenon since its inception.
But what if the new generations of designers
won’t be able to replace their predecessors?
What if the passing of leadership inside of
signature firms will make evident that, after all,
something impossible to teach is deeply root-
ed in the eyes, minds and hands of those who
gave birth to them? What if magazines, prizes,
Biennales and eventually clients will lament a
loss of quality in the production of after-stu-
dios? Will they accept their new condition,
slowly abandoning the top-class podium they
occupied to become average architecture firms?
Will they slowly fade away, after a period of
struggle to regain their lost position? Or will
they once more fight to survive? And how?
There are no precedents that let us envision
how the starchitecture business will evolve
from its traditional assett to its soon to come
after-condition. Zaha’s death fell on us like a
thunder and reshuffled the cards of a deck we
have to learn how to play. If any, it seems that
we can once more turn to the field of fashion,
where similar occurrences have a long-last-
ing tradition, and try to translate, as a radical
exercise, some of its strategies in architectural
terms.
How would common concepts in the fash-
ion world such as, for example, “multi-brand
company”, “limited edition”, “guest designer” or
“trade-dress”, reshape future architectural cul-
ture? We don’t know. We probably don’t want
to know. But we may discover soon.
Notes
1. Caroline Bainbridge, Why are so many celeb-
rities dying in 2016?, in The Guardian, April 27,
2016. http://www.theguardian.com/comment-
isfree/2016/apr/27/why-celebrities-dying-2016
2. Paul Keskeys, “A Great Architect, a Great Per-
son”: An Emotional Tribute to Zaha Hadid by
Libeskind, Rogers, Foster and More, in Architiz-
er, May 13, 2016. http://architizer.com/blog/a-
great-architect-a-great-person-zaha-hadid/
3. Ibid.
4. Roberto Zancan, Zaha Hadid, la liberazione
delle forme o la prigionia dell’icona?, in Gli Stati
Generali, April 1, 2016. http://www.glistatigen-
erali.com/architettura-urbanistica/zaha-had-
id-la-liberazione-delle-forme-o-la-prigio-
nia-dellicona/
5. Davide Ponzini, The Values of Starchitec-
ture: Commodification of Architectural Design
in Contemporary Cities, in “Organizational
Aesthetics”, Vol. 3, n.1, 2014, p. 15. http://digi-
talcommons.wpi.edu/oa/vol3/iss1/4/
6. Steven Erlanger, Grieving and Going For-
ward: How Zaha Hadid’s Firm Plans to Move
On, in The New York Times, April 20, 2016.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/arts/
design/grieving-and-going-forward-how-zaha-
hadids-firm-plans-to-moveon.html
7. Luca Gibello, Lavorare da Zaha: come prima,
più di prima, in Il Giornale dell’Architettura,
April 19, 2016. http://ilgiornaledellarchitettura.
com/web/2016/04/19/lavorare-da-zaha-come-
prima-piu-di-prima/
8. Patrick Schumacher in Erlanger, cit.
9. Kasper Worm-Petersen, Turning idealism in
good business, in “Grasp Magazine”, April 25
2013. http://graspmag.org/leadership/turning-
idealism-and-skill-into-good-business/
7
10. The answer is, obviously, B.

11. http://wwd.com/fashion-news/de-
signer-luxury/vuitton-confirms-nico-
las-ghesquire-hire-7262148/?module=hp-fash-
ion

12. “El Croquis” n. 84: Herzog & De Meuron

1993-1997, Madrid 1997

13. It must be said that in recent times many

architectural firms (like BIG, or Snøhetta) were
founded from the beginning as impersonal
entities, with a fluid and planned growth or
turnover of collaborators, managing partners
and international headquarters, such that they
should not have issues in continuing their ac-
tivities even in the absence of whom gave them
the birth.

8 After Us