Synchronising Creativity. Bringing Specialised Management Skills into Architecture Bureaus II

Here we have a graph showing 24 hours in the life of Le Corbusier.

Graph based on research by Mason Currey into the daily routines of famous creative figures. Graphic design by RJ Andrews / Info We Trust

Our favourite part is when he arrives at the office and puts his staff to work on the ideas he had in the morning. That’s definitely a dream very few people other than Olafur Eliasson can consider putting into practice nowadays. Eliasson’s relationship with his collaborators is almost certainly very different from that of architects like Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright.

But graphs have also been made of other creative minds, because, after all, the number of hours in a day is the same for all of us.

And if we gather up the data, we could bring the “creative routines” of several famous figures together in one graph and compare them.

*Based on Mason Currey’s work “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work”. Infographic created by creative marketing agency Distilled. https://podio.com/site/creative-routines

Let’s imagine for a moment that all those minds, so creative and so solitary, each with their own obsessions and time schedules, had to work together. How would they do that? Differences apart, that’s the puzzle we try to solve every day, and it’s undoubtedly one of the major challenges facing new studios which tend increasingly towards multinodal, liquid work structures more like neural networks than pyramids.

Right from its foundation in 2001, Zuloark has defined itself as a “zone of proximal development”(ZPD)¹; that’s to say, a learning platform open to anyone who wishes to take part, the very existence of which is based on the creation of pedagogical environments. In those early days we tried to share tasks and projects in a non-discriminatory way, complementing each other’s different talents in order to be able to spend more time combining our personal interests, launching projects and initiatives under the umbrella of a group made up of anonymous individuals, and subverting the logical attribution of credit for ideas as taught in Architecture departments at university. Without being particularly brilliant students, or individually more talented than anyone else, we were nevertheless aware of the exponential power our projects would have when we managed to synchronise our different skills and abilities creatively and equitably.

Achieving that synchrony is the key to all this. Over the years, the number of variables affecting our lives as individuals and our aspirations as a group of budding professionals have made it necessary for us to come up with increasingly complex forms of organisation but without losing our trademark flexibility.

Zuloark has never actually existed. So, legally at least, “Zuloark is whoever feels part of Zuloark”. On this basis, and to enable certain people who feel part of Zuloark to become synchronised economically in the way that’s most convenient for them, a legal framework was created. This entity, which does exist, is made up of a series of freelance architects and a cooperative called Matrioska D&R.

Having covered the legal requirements, the other tools we use to synchronise our activity are a network of online applications, invented policies, productive meetings and established procedures for distributing reproductive tasks. These will be explained in detail in the next article. For now, we invite you to describe your own creative routines and tell us what tools you find most useful for coordinating your teams.

Text translated by Andrew. V. Taylor