Do all the best creative organisations end with an M?

This is the best post I've never written.

I was thinking about Pentagram, Archigram and Magnum and how they've all got similar co-operative style set ups. They're all at the top of their field. They've all got great longevity. And they all end in M, which is probably important.

So I thought I'd write about this.

But the thing is I don't really know enough about all of the organisations. So I asked some experts to write a few words on the structure of each organisation and how that helps contribute to their success. The experts don't need any introduction. A huge thank you to each of them.

You can't help but be inspired and excited by reading all of these texts.

The passion of the protagonists and the power of the collective is evident in each organisation. Investigate further and you'll see that the quality of the work is incredible and consistent.

A few things stand out for me. Firstly they all seem to have been formed out of an honest idea to create amazing work. Secondly they all seem to have come to the same conclusion about the kind of organisation which begets superior work and thirdly that structure has been copied by significantly few others.

So read the stuff below and like me you'll find yourself wanting work in an organistation that pushes the boundaries, puts creative doers at it's heart, where excellence perpetuates and which ends in M.

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Henrietta Thompson on Magnum

Magnum was a war baby. Founded by four photographers just back from the frontlines in 1947 Magnum Photos resulted from a powerful what-the-hell manifesto, and despite celebrating its 60th birthday last year, its vision is as still just as strong as ever.

Picture taken from the Magnum website, usual rules apply.

Robert Capa, David –Chim- Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger established Magnum in an effort to change in the way photography was traded. In order to empower photojournalists to work truly creatively, without the constraints of demanding managing agents and editors Mangum made a departure from conventional practice in two ways: Firstly, the necessary staff would exist to support (rather than direct) the photographers. Secondly, the authors of the imagery held the copyright - not the magazines, so if a photographer was published in Paris Match, Magnum could still then sell the same photographs to Life magazine, say, or the Picture Post. This meant that the photographer would gain the means to work on new projects even without an assignment. More importantly, it meant that photojournalism would be recognized as the artform it was.

Picture by Martin Parr, taken from the Magnum website, usual rules apply.

With the flexibility to choose their own stories (and to work for long as it took to get the right shot) the photojournalism being processed by Magnum was – and is still – very different to that of a photographer on commission: there is a point of view to the stories that goes far beyond the purposes of event recording. “We often photograph events that are called 'news' ," Cartier-Bresson told Byron Dobell of "Popular Photography" magazine in 1957, " Life isn't made of stories that you cut into slices like an apple pie. There's no standard way of approaching a story. We have to evoke a situation, a truth. This is the poetry of life's reality."

Picture by Elliot Erwitt, taken from the Magnum website, usual rules apply.

Magnum today is still such a cooperative, operating from offices in London, New York, Paris and Tokyo - and providing photographs to the world’s media, galleries and museums. It is entirely owned by the photographers it represents and , if you see an iconic image of any significant world event since the Spanish civil war and are not sure who took it, chances are it was a Magnum photographer.

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Michael Bierut on Pentagram



The Public Theater, New York identity by Pentagram, usual rules apply.


Pentagram's structure is based on a few simple principals. First, the first is structured around its partners, each of whom runs an autonomous team of designers who are dedicated to working on that partner's projects. This is meant to replicate the creative intensity of a small design office, where everyone is focused on the work. Second, all of the partners are designers. There are no partners who are managers, or strategists, or account people. That means that while money is important -- the partners have to be good businesspeople, after all, since they can't pass that responsibility off -- the attention of the firm is on design, not money.

The Fashion Center information kiosk by Pentagram, usual rules apply.

Third, the partners are all equal, regardless of seniority. Finally, the partners are diverse. There are architects, product designers and new media designers along with the graphic designers, and even the graphic designers have wildly divergent styles. This means that there are many advantages in working collaboratively.

These principals are surprisingly unchanged since firm's founding in 1972. I think they've guaranteed a certain amount of stability, a longstanding commitment to good design, and slow but steady growth.

Saks Fifth Avenue Identity by Pentagram, usual rules apply.

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Dan Hill on the "Archigram - What - Organisation - You - Must - Be - Joking - Mate"


The bare facts are these. Six youngish men come together in various flats in Hampstead, London, in the early 1960s. They produce a magazine-like publication Archigram, that lasted from 1961 to 1970 (roughly), and the firm that had grown out of it Archigram Architects, lasts until 1975. 900 drawings are produced along the way, yet assessed In terms of built projects they produce only a playground in Milton Keynes and a swimming pool for Rod Stewart. If that. And yet they influence architecture profoundly. Their work is the thing, and should be pored over time and time again (see refs. below), but the question here is whether their organisational structure aided this extraordinary state of affairs.

Archigram pictures from all over the place, usual rules apply.

The 'rock group' motif attached to Archigram is a little overplayed - generally the analogy goes they were "the Beatles of architecture", a lazy comparison based around their perceived insouciance, iconoclasm and psychedelic visuals, exploding out of a then-stuffy trade. "A necessary irritant" as Barry Curtis called them. Firstly, they were of course far better than the wildly overrated Beatles. (Even musically: in the retrospective at the Design Museum a few years ago, the visitor was confronted with The Yes Album playing, from a messy mock-up of their studio, but it really should've been Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.)

Secondly, the key point of difference is that they heavily influenced without making buildings. Could a band influence as much without releasing a record? In this, they were part of a tradition of un-built but visionary work that makes architecture and urbanism almost unique in design practice. So what set them apart was the publishing.

That espoused a take on modernism informed by a generally positive reaction to the technology and media that had which emerged, with necessary inventiveness, from WWII, a conflict that was still front of most people's minds, self-evident in the half-shattered cities around them. This optimism and invention is then allied to the 'post-scarcity' culture that emerges in the late-'50s, as they cut and paste the space race onto colour telly and pop-art and planned obsolescence, spray-painting structural engineering with beat poetry and Harold Wilson's 'white heat of technology', fusing Monty Python montage into avant-garde internationalist happenings in, wait for it, Folkestone. In pursuing the unbuilt, ephemeral, temporary and informational, they are precursors for a version of the 21st century (at least the one unaffected by peak oil).

Their proposals for Instant, Walking or Plug-In Cities, Suitaloons and Living Pods, were radical, fluid, malleable, intimate and transient - "tune up, clip on, plug in" into "rooms (that) expand infinitely. Our walls dissolve into impermeable mists or into the imagery of stories and fables ...".

The Walking City by Archigram. Pictures from all over the place, usual rules apply.

Yet their own structure remained relatively solid. If not the band, the architectural practice was essentially their recognisable model, though that is usually just as rife with splits, egos, and partners flouncing out over non-musical differences. There seems to have been little of that in Archigram's dissolution. Only that a large scheme in Monte Carlo fell through, and their fabric couldn't stretch over the distance from Folkestone to Los Angeles, which is a long way geographically but even further culturally.

So there's a disparity between their projects - "an architecture that twitched ... was responsive to people" - and their own structure. Certainly, it seems to have been fairly disorganised. Reyner Banham called them, the "Archigram-What-Organisation-You-Must-Be-Joking-Mate". But no more so than for many other architects.

The two groups of three came together to form six (three out of the art schools, and the other three working at the innovative London County Council). In a recent interview, the group's Peter Cook listed their roles:

" I was the enthusiast. Mike Webb was the genius. Ron [Herron] was the fantastically fluent member. Warren [Chalk] was the warrior. David [Greene] the poet. Dennis [Crompton] was the technologist. And I was the beaver, the operational person. Everybody overlaps, but that's the simplified version."

So we see the specialist-meets-multidisciplinary brew common to many micro firms. Though they were all essentially trained in the same master discipline, Cook points out they ranged over 10 years in age and came from different schools - "There was a hint of internal competitiveness. So it was rather like a studio in a college would be—looking over the shoulder of the other and thinking, "That's interesting, now I must do something, too."

The fact they were rarely troubled by praxis may have enabled the six-person team to remain six - to attempt to build much of what they proposed would have inevitably meant a certain fraying at the edges, as this highly complex work now tends to involve numerous specialists. Plus of course the messy necessity of clients.  Firms actually approaching their ideas in built form these days - arguably OMA/AMO, Arup, MVRDV, Foster, Rogers, Herzog + De Meuron, Future Systems, Morphosis and Atelier Bow Wow perhaps - are larger, highly diverse, often corporate structures.

Archigram pictures from all over the place, usual rules apply.

But as an ideas generator, this 6-person team of occasionally spiky, overlapping semi-specialists, unified by a single trade, medium and sensibility, was immensely productive. Given that medium was publishing, and their trade ideas, it was also immensely flexible. They took to heart the maxim, perhaps after Cedric Price, that "when you are looking for a solution to what you have been told is an architectural problem - remember, the solution may not be a building."

Cook, the most vocal member today, is slippery on who was actually in the office, doing what. But also notes that the "untidy structure", as he called it, meant they've never really stopped as well. As they transcend a firm and become more of a genre, they become less of an organisation and more of an idea.

If we can get that fluid with things, a key part of their organisation not often articulated might be the umbrella. In a sense, they were part of an un-named and equally loosely-aligned multidisciplinary movement, with Cedric Price, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, James Stirling, Buckminster Fuller, Reyner Banham and The Smithsons hovering over the group as some kind of unlikely beneficent chorus. Other firms or movements, such as Italy's Superstudio, Japan's Metabolists, fore-runners Team X, are also part of this scene. In this, a fluid membrane of intellect surrounded the group, through which ideas could be tested, progressed, translated or deleted.  A jellyfish-like structure comes to mind, a translucent, flexible dome of thinking, floating over a smallish core body.

This was not a formal organisation at all - barely even a movement, just partly-shared sensibilities - but enabled a rich loam for fertilising ideas, and created a purpose and direction for the work. It's difficult to see equivalents today. Might this layered umbrella structure be the important factor? They might have called it the 'organisation gloop'.

Archigram pictures from all over the place, usual rules apply.

Cook asserts "the strength of Archigram was surely its layers of inconsistent parts, keeping going a continual fascination with each other. " So within the gloop, this fascination holds the core. It's almost no more than a sudden freeze-frame on a longer timeline, a group of people coalescing around a way of thinking, as much as doing. They were a purely informational organisation, as close to media, marketing, branding, banking or academia as to architecture, as was their work.

So perhaps the essence to extract from Archigram's organisation was not in their own structure, but in the structure of the buildings they proposed - an organisation that twitches, is responsive to people; an organisation that coalesces, exists briefly, and then is gone, existing only in time; organisations that can expand infinitely, or dissolve into stories and fables; organisations in which the function can switch fluidly; organisations with a permeable skin ... Really, you could take Archigram's work and find and replace the words 'built environment' or 'architecture' or 'city' with the word 'organisation', and that would give you a truly innovative structure indeed.

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References:

Archigram
Archigram.net
Archigram [Wikipedia]
Concerning Archigram - Dennis Crompton (ed.)
Archigram - Peter Cook (ed.)
Archigram: Architecture without Architecture - Simon Sadler
Interview with Sir Peter Cook [Architectural Record]

Pentagram
Pentagram Design
Paula Scher's Family Of Men diagram / video
Pentagram Blog
Pentagram [Wikipedia]

Pentagram Publications
Alan Fletcher biog with some Pentagram history

Magnum
Magnum Photo
Magnum Blog
Magnum [Wikipedia]

Comments

[er?]

Very interesting post. Thanks to all involved.

[Rob Mortimer]

Excellent stuff.
I enjoyed reading about Archigram at the architecture exhibition in the Barbican a year or so ago.

[lauren]

fabulous post. ben, perhaps you should go into editing, considering your excellent record for commissioning great posts by others!!

[Steve O]

Great read - thanks.

[Morpheus]

Interesting post! About the 'm' thing. This might not be too relevant..but a well renowned film director in India - Subhash Ghai, is also enamoured by the M, his films start with M and he has also known to rename the leading lady in his films with a name starting with M.
There must be some deeper, darker connotations to the M!

[Charlie Gower]

God I love Archigram. I never get tired of reading about them. Thanks.

[Indy]

There's another resonance to "M." The "M form" is a classic of organisation theory:

http://hrd.rediff.com/money/2005/jun/09bspec.htm

(Of course, very different to these firms, but an interesting resonance all the same.)