What’s in a (Firm’s) Name? Thinking About Succession and Legacy

The agreement in place at the time of Hadid’s death, at the age of 65, licensed the trademark to the firm in exchange for 6 percent of its global net income. Between 2018 and 2024, that portion totaled around $27 million—a contribution the firm says is unsustainable, and was only meant to supply Hadid with a source of income during her lifetime. ZHF disputes this claim, arguing that the “indefinite” arrangement was indeed intended to be permanent. In 2025, ZHA went to court to challenge this contract, which gave it no option to quit, and lost. In February, however, it appealed and won.

“Can it sensibly be said,” asked the judge, “that the parties intended the company to be bound to associate itself with and to promote Dame Zaha’s architectural identity in 100 years’ time?”

In principle ZHA is now free to change its name, though it doesn’t really want to. For now, at least, Hadid’s image is integral to its brand and the firm insists that her work remains the wellspring for the parametric style it champions. Instead, ZHA will aim to renegotiate its license.

Although neither the firm nor foundation would formally comment on the matter, citing the ongoing legal deliberations, just before press time ZHF sought to take its case to the U.K.’s highest court of appeal. There could yet be another twist in the tale.

This conflict illustrates the general need to carefully align concerns regarding legacy with those pertaining to future business interests, when preparing for succession. It’s a vexed subject. Some founders are uncomfortable attaching their own names to work they won’t control. Their successors, meanwhile, are often keen to preserve brand equity built up, in part, by their own efforts.

The late Richard Rogers certainly had such questions in mind as far back as the 1980s, when beginning to think about his own succession. He established a charitable foundation to assume ownership of his practice, which in 2007 rebranded as Rogers Stirk Harbour to reflect the appointment of two young codirectors. In 2022, just one year after he died at 88, and two years after Rogers’s formal retirement, the firm was rechristened RSHP—removing the founder’s name within the timeframe stipulated by its governing constitution.

“There haven’t been many good second-generation practices,” says director Graham Stirk. “Richard always cited the example of Frank Lloyd Wright as a reason why he wanted his name removed.”

RSHP’s leaders did in fact decline an opportunity to retain Rogers’s name for a fee, Stirk elaborates, and instead looked for a new identity that subtly evokes the firm’s history. Rogers’s initial recognizes his role in establishing the parent charity, while the other names were also abbreviated to emphasize a collective ethos.

“The practice actually belongs to no one,” says Stirk, adding that the impersonal acronym prepares the way for the next generation of leaders. “It signals that there isn’t a complete blockage at the top. When I leave, I leave; I don’t need to mark my territory like a dog.”

Naming was also intensively debated in succession planning at Robert A.M. Stern Architects. Long before Stern’s death last year, at the age of 86, his partners argued that the firm should adopt the additional sobriquet RAMSA to reduce the focus on any one individual. “Bob struggled with it because he liked the personal aspect, and referred disparagingly to firms with names ‘like radio stations,’ ” says partner Graham Wyatt. “But he did come to understand the benefit.”

In the partnership agreement struck in 1989, the firm’s new leaders were also careful to secure rights to its original—and still official—name. “As much as we like RAMSA as a marketing tool,” says partner Roger Seifter, “we also value the name Robert Stern. In fact, the partners own it, so Bob never had a chance to take it back.”

Having both identities has been important. Academic and civic clients readily accepted RAMSA, while high-end developers, especially of apartment buildings, still wanted the stardust of a big name. “They much preferred the fantasy that Bob personally chose the door hardware,” says Wyatt, “and could then sell a development as a so-called Bob Stern project.” Even in that market, however, the firm has seen desire for the founder’s signature diminish over time as other partners have grown their own reputations.

Firms like RSHP and RAMSA had to develop their own blueprints for succession with limited data. In the last century there was little expectation that elite firms would outlast the figurehead. The offices of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn effectively died along with them. Today’s large starchitect-led firms may have much more solid corporate structures, but until recently, few have gone through the test of whether they could withstand the loss of the founder’s aura.

When Hadid died, many observers predicted the firm’s rapid demise, and Schumacher was frank about the uncertainty. Just two years earlier he had told RECORD: “We have been discussing this issue internally and recognize this as a challenge in a firm or brand with a charismatic founder-leader-celebrity.” In an interview with Archinect shortly after her death, he outlined future plans, should the firm survive.

Yet, at the time, ZHA had around 35 ongoing projects; today it has more than 100. RAMSA, RSHP, Grimshaw (whose founder, Nicholas Grimshaw, died last September, at the age of 85), and others remain healthy and still contend for high-profile projects. Ennead was another success; formerly known as Polshek Partnership, in 2010 the firm took a calculated risk in changing its name, following the departure of late founder James Polshek, then 80. Recent news of its acquisition by CannonDesign caught many by surprise.

Growing precedent should reassure a clutch of celebrated firms headed by architects now well advanced in age. Nevertheless, those that have yet to complete that transition are understandably tight-lipped on matters that are personally and commercially delicate.

In 2022, Swiss newspapers reported that Herzog & de Meuron had begun a step-by-step sale of shares to the firm’s 15 partners, advancing an intergenerational succession plan in place since 2009. The firm declined to elaborate further for this story.

Bigger questions surround Gehry Partners in Los Angeles, following the death of founder Frank Gehry—the epitomic starchitect—in December at the age of 96. In the past, Gehry appeared ambivalent about the afterlife of his “well-oiled machine.” In 2011, he told the Harvard Business Review that the firm had several people “good enough to take over.” Three years later, in an interview for RECORD, he hoped they would “spread their wings.” But when asked if that would happen under his name, he answered bluntly: “I would hope not. I would hope they would get their own identity.” Today, the practice confirms that discussions with Gehry continued, but says it is too soon to comment publicly on future developments.  

The Norman Foster Foundation in Madrid houses the eponymous architect’s archive. Photo © Pablo Gomez-Ogando/Norman Foster Foundation

For Reinier de Graaf, 61, a partner at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the uncertainty that ensues from a founder’s departure spotlights structural weaknesses in the business of architecture that harm individual careers and the profession writ large.

De Graaf’s recent book, Architecture Against Architecture, is a 14-point manifesto calling for an urgent reset of the discipline. Many of its prescriptions resemble suggestions that architects often propose when preparing for succession. For example, he argues that architects should retire at 67—generally in line with other professions—to make room for younger talent and normalize the expectation of transition. Ownership, he says, should be transferred to employees. And, critically, the profession should cease to valorize individual stars, skewing perception of the creative process.

“We have to hold it against ourselves that we have been unable to communicate the true nature of our business,” de Graaf says. “There’s the ridiculous idea of the architect as the lone genius with a 6B pencil, distributing his scribbles over the floors below to be executed. I loathe all that.”

Even when firms do take steps to emphasize the collective—as Rem Koolhaas, 81, did, alongside Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, in giving OMA a consciously generic name—clients and the media will push for prominent individuals. Compliance is a seductive trap. “For my taste, we are too ambiguous about whether we like that or not,” says de Graaf. “Occasionally we fall into the temptation of sticking our founder’s name to a prospective project to increase the chances of bringing it in, only to regret it because it burdens the whole thing with unrealistic expectations about who is doing the work. It always sucks.”

RAMSA’s Paul Whalen echoes the sentiment that sharing credit is both a practical and moral imperative. “The hero-architect idea is not sustainable over multiple generations,” he says. “That person is eventually going to die, and, for the benefit of the people around him or her, it’s better to acknowledge that they alone couldn’t have designed everything.” RAMSA’s second generation of leaders began with a modest step: appending the plural Architects to a monograph titled Robert A.M. Stern. “That took some gall,” adds Wyatt.

Conversations about money and mortality are rarely easy, but firms that have completed effective successions stress the importance of starting early. At RSHP, the long period of shared control was vital, says Stirk. “We were seen to be active alongside Richard, and not abandoned as he pulled away.”

At RAMSA, Stern’s young lieutenants had to trigger the discussion. At first, Stern seemed unconcerned about a far-off future. “Bob literally said to us, ‘Après moi, le déluge,’ ” says Roger Seifter, with a laugh. “Well, we didn’t want the déluge, and he came ’round to the idea that succession was important.”

Once that threshold has been crossed, Whalen continues, the details can be hammered out without pressure over years. At RAMSA, that allowed exploration of different structures, in a process led by senior staff with outside consultants, and critical commentary by Stern. They chose a partnership, allowing the possibility that more staff could become shareholders later. “We actively chose that, and to have a single office—they didn’t happen by default,” says Wyatt. “It was done with later succession in mind, and what a rising generation will want to buy into.”

Other firms have chosen from a variety of possible structures that suit their own long-term aims. Stability shaped thinking in Rogers’s firm, where the existing directors developed an ownership model in keeping with his egalitarian ideals, says Stirk. The charitable foundation acquired the firm from its original directors, paying over years from profits, and now owns all equity in RSHP, so new leaders are “naked in, naked out,” he says. Unlike the case with a partnership, there is no buy-in cost, no share sale on retirement, and limited risk that personal greed could spark future conflict.

While successors prepare for challenges, founders might be preoccupied with thoughts of posterity. How will their own story be told? How might their influence extend beyond the present, and the office? And who will care for voluminous archives representing a life’s work?

An obvious repository is the firm itself. In principle, successors have a vested interest in the maintenance of a reputation. In practice, though, day-to-day demands take precedence over retrospection. Rogers’s archive is owned by the same trust as RSHP, which manages the material, but Stirk acknowledges that the task requires significant time and effort: “At the moment we haven’t got our heads around the material,” he says. “It’s a huge undertaking, and we’ve got other things to deal with; the key thing is to stay relevant.”

The sentiment is echoed by James von Klemperer, president of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF). Now stewarded by its second generation of leadership, the firm is unusual in that its founders’ initial intention was to build an organization that would outlast them. One outcome is a culture that has always promoted the team over individuals and a determinedly forward-looking attitude—something apparent even in its 50th-anniversary celebrations this year.

“Maybe we’re just getting to the stage where it’s appropriate to reflect on and represent what we’ve done in the past,” he says. “But if that were simply celebration or hagiography, and we’re not focused on the hunt for work and the quality of work today, it doesn’t seem responsible to those people who are making the firm their future.”

Other founders have deposited archives with cultural or academic institutions. Gehry’s is at the Getty Research Institute, for example, while Stern’s naturally was donated to Yale, where he served as dean. His gift also entails a real cost to RAMSA, both in managing the ongoing transfer of material, dedicated staff, and direct financial support.

Many would-be donors are unaware of such overhead costs, says Aric Chen, the Chicagoan director of ZHF, who previously held curatorial and leadership roles at several museums and architecture institutions. “There’s a substantial cost to maintaining archives, to say nothing of activating them,” he says. “A lot of institutions now limit the number they take, which comes as a shock to those who want to donate or sell their archives, but find there aren’t as many takers.”

Steven Holl’s collection of models and drawings is located in upstate New York. Photo © Paul Warchol

For a remarkable number of practitioners, the preferred option has been to establish a foundation. These are ambitious, cost-intensive affairs with a remit beyond mere storage. Hadid’s foundation acquired London’s former Design Museum, suggesting plans for a public role that have been constrained by its current legal fight. The foundation of Renzo Piano, 88, in the splendid Villa Nave next door to his practice’s headquarters in Genoa, on the coast of Italy, is engaged in publishing and education. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, both 76, have the nonprofit Kabinett in their home city of Basel. Headquartered in a landmarked Madrid palace, the Norman Foster Found­ation was founded by the now 91-year-old architect in 2017. It runs a range of educational, cultural, and research programs that rivals most public institutions.

Motivations might include ego, or philanthropic instincts, and perhaps some attractive tax advantages as founders disentangle from their firms. For Steven Holl, 78, it was a “spontaneous” decision to exhibit art in the backyard that evolved into the nonprofit Steven Myron Holl Foundation. Its programs blend architecture, art, music, and poetry, reflecting long-standing interests that sometimes don’t have an outlet in his day job.

“A practice is really a commercial enterprise,” says Holl, “but the teaching of architecture is a kind of mission, and expanding ideas around art and architecture is important to me.” (Holl runs the independent foundation with his wife, Dimitra Tsachrelia, who is also a principal in the practice.)

Situated on the 28-acre forested T2 reserve in upstate New York, in Rhinebeck, it operates out of a collection of small buildings that developed organically over the span of a decade. The compound hosts events and residencies and now includes the T2 gallery, a studio, an experimental house, and an archive building, added, says Holl, as something of an afterthought. Racks of models freed from a Greenpoint, Brooklyn, warehouse draw in schoolkids and architecture students alongside former members of his practice who appreciate being able to revisit their creations. For now, that material is technically on loan and remains the property of the firm. At some point, the foundation will figure out the means to acquire them.

It’s a detail that speaks to the many complications navigated by architects as they sketch out new forms for their firms, and new avenues for their energies. At the other end of the spectrum is the conflict over Hadid’s legacy. All add to the understanding of succession—and the value of a name. If they point the way for others, the lawyers’ loss will be architecture’s gain.