Architects Talking to Non Architects: An Effective Strategy

The architectural firms which can make themselves understood by the general public obtain the best results in terms of revenue and visibility, while the same cannot be said of the firms able to make themselves clear to other architects. That's one of the insights of I primi 100 studi di architettura al mondo: risultati di una ricerca esplorativa e temi emergenti, a SDA Bocconi study realized by Leonardo Caporarello and Beatrice Manzoni presented today and discussed by Rem Koolhaas, a leading Dutch architect, winner of a Pritzker Prize for architecture and one of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time magazine.

The authors analyze the largest 100 architectural firms according to the "BD World Architecture 100" ranking and measure their economic performance using revenue, the symbolic performance within their professional community using the number of citations in two international journals and the symbolic performance towards the general public using the number of Google results. They then assess the alignment of the image firms intend to give and the image perceived by the architectural community and the general public using a content analysis of the firms' company profiles and the language used by the two targets when commenting the pictures of the firms' most famous works.

The first result of the study is that economic performance is positively correlated to the symbolic performance intended as visibility in the media. Furthermore, a good alignment of the intended image and the image perceived by the general public translates into better financial results, while the same cannot be said of the alignment with the image perceived by the architectural community.

Confirming that managerial and creative vocations are hard to reconcile, only one firm enters the top 10 in all the three performances (revenue, renown in the professional community, visibility in the media). Furthermore, 66 firms out of 100 show a creative orientation in terms of services offered and company profiles, against 12 showing a managerial orientation and 9 defined as mixed. A graphic confirmation of the same is given by a series of tag clouds (in the picture, the tag cloud of the words used by all the 100 firms in their company profiles).

The firms with the best economic performance are characterized by a larger size in terms of locations and personnel (particularly staff supporting the architects), a larger number of realized projects, more services offered (particularly in the engineering, project management and consulting areas), more focalization on few sectors and higher average age since foundation.

Among the 100 best performing firms in the world, 40 come out of Europe, 37 out of Americas, 16 out of Asia and 7 out of Oceania. Their average age since foundation is 57 years, the number of realized projects 152, the staff 821 including 273 architects, revenue € 84 million.

The study suggests the need for more attention towards managerial aspects in an industry that, before the financial crisis, had global revenues of €530 billion. That's true especially for Italy, the second country in the world for the share of architects on the population (behind Japan) and first in Europe, but characterized by a studio orientation. Are the considerations that emerge from the study valid for Italian architects and firms? The research will go on aiming at answering this question.

The tag cloud for the top 100 firms