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With five partners and a payroll of about 70 people, SHoP Architects doesn't quite qualify as a small firm. All the same, it doesn't compare to design-world immensities like Norman Foster's sprawling operation in London or just about any branch of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But last summer, this medium-size Manhattan-based company won a very big project?the new headquarters for Google, the virtual-world behemoth based in Mountain View, Calif...
Will this boost its Web page to a top spot on Google? It will certainly make SHoP more visible everywhere else. For a while now, SHoP has been one of those firms whose name you keep noticing, attached to projects that look interesting. It's interesting all by itself. One thing distinguishes SHoP right away: it's not just a firm; it's a family. The five principals are Gregg Pasquarelli and his wife Kimberly Holden plus William and Coren Sharples, who are also husband and wife, and William's identical-twin brother Christopher. All of them are graduates...
...Their new offices in lower Manhattan are stuffed with models for real projects, not propositions?numerous condos, two retail commissions in Beijing, the master plan for an entire city in India, a classroom building at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and a partnership with the firm of eminent British architect Richard Rogers and landscape designer Ken Smith to weave esplanades, greenery and pavilions into a two-mile (3 km) stretch of waterfront along Manhattan's Lower East Side...
...people who follow architecture, SHoP first came seriously into view in 2000, when the firm won a competition to build an outdoor summer hangout in the courtyard of P.S. 1, in Queens, N.Y., an arts-space affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art. It was at a moment when free-form, computer-assisted "blob" architecture was just breaking out of classrooms and professional journals. With a scheme called Dunescape, SHoP proved that blobs could be the basis for a structure both delightful and usable, stable but almost erotic in its waving surfaces. An undulating fabric of wood slats, it formed...
...quick calculation," says Pasquarelli. "Five dollars admission per museumgoer plus an average of two beers plus maybe a hot dog or a hamburger times 10 weekends. We had generated somewhere between half a million and a million dollars in revenue for the museum." Meanwhile, the firm's design fee had been only $10,000, with a $50,000 construction budget. "That really made us think about how we could tie our design fees to the success of our projects," he says...