Larry Speck

As an architecture and engineering firm, how do you step up your game periodically?  In the life of a practice, it’s important to take a snapshot and reflect upon various considerations, and that’s what we’ve done in creating the new Page whose name and logo were revealed December 16. It’s been a process of renewal, of rethinking our ambitions, our identity, direction, and values to communicate who we are and how we want to take this 116-year old firm into the future.  For this blog posting, I wanted to write a recap the experience:

In early 2013, we started our re-branding process which itself was the result of a graphics refresh undertaken earlier with Herman Dyal in 2012.  In that effort, Herman, who is also a good friend, came up with some great ideas and we recognized a need to do something more ambitious and fundamental.  We studied a number of different firms both within and outside architecture, but there wasn’t any single firm or even small group of firms that stood out for us.  We drew bits of inspiration from many different sources.

We are redefining the culture of our company by making it a much flatter organization with broader ownership and more empowerment and responsibility for a larger number of people.  The ultimate goal is to encourage entrepreneurial spirit among our people and increase collaboration among our various offices.

To maximize the message, we are  working through conventional media/communication outlets, as well as  concentrating a lot of attention on social media.  The new website, pagethink.com, is very strongly focused on our people—who they are, what they do, what they think, what expertise they have, etc.  We are making a strong effort to get leaders and experts in the firm to blog and tweet and post regularly so that there is a constant refreshing of that grassroots description.

Since its founding as C.H. Page in 1898, we have rebranded ourselves many times through the years and have even used a whole family of names including: Page Brothers, Page, Southerland and Page, PSP and most recently, PageSoutherlandPage.  Now, we consider Page the next and natural stage of our growth and evolution.  The newest statement of our brand makes it clear that we focus on “design that makes lives better”.  It is a sincere expression of values we have held for some time, but have not declared as explicitly as we are doing now.

Ultimately, the self-evaluation process keeps us focused on values and priorities and enables us to communicate to clients, potential clients and others what we, at Page, stand for in architecture and what we have to offer.