Word: pasquarelli
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...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 of the Columbia University architecture program. Four of them were in the same 1994 graduating class. Three of them have the same birthday...
...Zaha Hadid. But it was a moment that didn't sit well with the partners who would come together as SHoP in 1996. "Theorizing about buildings had become more important than building them," says Coren Sharples. "If you actually built, you were selling out. It was very disheartening." Adds Pasquarelli: "There were the guardians of culture, and there were the architects who just served clients. There was nothing in between...
...matter here that Pasquarelli had come to architecture from investment banking and that Coren had a degree in business and marketing?not backgrounds that dispose you to think of philosophy as a hot career path. "We didn't want to do anything that was not exciting in terms of design," Coren says. "But at the same time, we believed in running a successful business. That was a central idea that brought us together...
Dunescape became a sizable hit, drawing thousands of visitors over the summer to eat, drink, lounge and just caper around the thing. And that taught the SHoP team an interesting lesson in finances. "One day we did a 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...
...Pasquarelli says that when he and his partners first proposed the unusual arrangement, they knew they were risking more than their money. They were putting into play their reputation among other architects. "A lot of them would say, 'That's a sellout. You're in bed with the developers, and you're losing your design freedom,'" he says. (Coren jumps in, adding, "They have said that.") But Pasquarelli insists that because they had sunk their own money in the project and stood to gain only if the apartments sold, they won the confidence of their developer partner Brown. They were...