As any good psychologist will tell you, names are destiny, imposing on newborn babies parental expectations that often become self-fulfilling prophecies. But just as children’s names go through inevitable cycles of fashion, so have architectural firms endured nomenclature fads that now have reached an unprecedented degree of ridiculousness.
Time was when multiple-partner architectural practices styled themselves like law offices, epitomized by McKim, Mead & White — the title it retained until 1961, more than three decades after the death of its last original principal. But by the late 1960s, firms began fiddling with their names in a transparent attempt to seem hip and happening.
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