Bill and Chris Sharples of SHoP Architects: Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career As An Architect
An Interview With Jason Hartman
Show your value — Don’t undersell the value you bring to the table, especially when it comes to how you mine, visualize, and share data in shaping and supporting critical decision-making and managing risk for clients.
As a part of my series about the ‘Five Things You Need To Know To Create A Highly Successful Career As An Architect’, I had the pleasure of interviewing Bill and Chris Sharples.
Identical twins Bill and Chris Sharples are two of the five founding principals of SHoP Architects — a Manhattan-based, globally-focused architecture firm with projects currently spanning five continents. The Sharples twins have applied their backgrounds in engineering and liberal arts to more than 20 years of industry leadership in design and master planning, working in complex urban contexts to create dynamic projects that transform communities. In addition to their work with SHoP and Assembly OSM — the twins’ manufacturing-based company that transforms the way buildings are designed and delivered — both Bill and Chris have taught and lectured at schools including Cornell University, Yale University, Columbia University and Parsons School of Design.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us the backstory about what brought you to this particular career path?
Chris: Bill and I both envisioned — and pursued — different career paths before we pursued architecture. Growing up with dyslexia, we struggled with self-confidence and were under the impression that specific jobs, like architecture, were meant for people who succeeded in reading and math. We weren’t sure there was an expansive enough definition of the profession that included us.
I went to Dickinson College and received a liberal arts degree. My junior year was formative, starting with the moment that our uncle John Abbott, who was a very well-known interior designer in New York City, asked Bill and I why we weren’t pursuing architecture given our creative eye, interest in building models and dioramas, and talent in art.
Uncle John said that I had what it takes to be successful in architecture, building on what I’d been learning during undergrad — history, philosophy, languages, anthropology, and physics. This made me reconsider my career path. I worked on my portfolio of painting and drawings. Then right after graduating from Dickinson, I decided to apply and was accepted into Columbia University to pursue a graduate degree in architecture.
Bill: I had a bit of a different start. After growing up on a farm, I had the initial goal of becoming a veterinarian, and went to Penn State to pursue that. After three semesters, I realized it wasn’t the path for me, so I transferred into an architectural engineering program. My roommate was in the program first — and I had actually ended up doing his homework for him from time to time. I thought the work was incredibly fascinating and fun, and it came easily to me. So, I decided to join the program myself.
After undergrad, I moved to Washington, D.C., where I worked on several notable projects, including the hangar that supported the president’s Air Force One 747 plane. This was during the Reagan administration. But after a few years I ended up losing interest in the projects I was being assigned. I applied to Columbia, knowing how much Chris was enjoying the architecture program there.
It was at Columbia where we met our future fellow SHoP founding principals Gregg Pasquarelli and Corie Sharples — whom I married a few years later. The key to our successful relationship and collaboration to this day is that we all came from different backgrounds, perspectives, and life experiences, and that we had all worked out in the real world before going to graduate school.
Collectively, we had an agenda of what we wanted to accomplish that enhanced our mission for a new kind of architecture practice as we came together as partners. Gregg had a clear idea on development and finance; Corie had a clear idea on business and marketing; Chris had the broadest liberal arts perspective; I had the tech and engineering background. All of these talents combined ended up reinforcing the DNA of SHoP.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Bill & Chris: We are working on a handful of exciting projects right now, across the globe. The Atlassian headquarters in Sydney, Australia, as well as U.S. embassy projects in Milan and Bangkok have given us the opportunity to really test out ideas that bring about the beauty, culture, and significance of how we experience sites and cities. We’re continually developing and applying new technologies in the interest of safeguarding the joyful, human elements of design and improving the process of collaboration in specific, authentic placemaking.
Bill: For the embassy projects, you’re a guest in someone’s country, but you’re also trying to protect the idea of communication, democracy, and global knowledge exchange. You can’t ask for a better situation. The only challenge is it takes so long. When we started on the embassies, a lot of the designers at SHoP didn’t want to spend five, six years working on them. Now that they’re starting to see the work being executed, they all want to work on an embassy project!
We love doing this sort of meaningful work. Getting all the drawings ready — and putting a series of beautiful books together to show how these projects came about, what the inspiration and evolution was — has been really affirming.
Chris: We have also been really excited with projects designing for the future of work. With the completion of the Uber, Atlassian, and YouTube headquarters, we’re helping people reconnect with the idea of an office, especially coming out of the pandemic. SHoP is working towards redefining the future of shared spaces, by focusing on creating space, light, natural ventilation, and fresh air that will ultimately make for productive, healthier and happier employees. It’s essential to always work with a focus on the future, which is our mission at SHoP.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Chris: SHoP has always been about expanding beyond the traditional practice of architecture through technology, culture, and business. Coming from a fine arts background, I was so used to communicating all my information in 2D that I could draw a perfectly straight line without a ruler! Now Bill and I build all our models in 3D, so we asked ourselves: Why is architecture still producing and communicating in 2D?
That’s when we started thinking about how we could effectively apply digital technology not only to design, but to share and communicate information with the builders, engineers, clients, and the whole project team. It has now been 25 years of developing that way of working, and it has allowed SHoP to flourish across a variety of spaces.
Is there a particular person who you are grateful toward who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Bill:
No question: our mother. As a mother of dyslexic twins, she recognized our struggles, leveraged our talent, and gave us confidence. Our talent was drawing. She got us into art schools. She understood how important it was to make sure that we got the proper support we needed.
Her encouragement taught us to help others who have had learning disabilities — encouraging young people to find something they’re really good at. Once they gain that important, core confidence that comes from excelling at a skill, the next step is leveraging that confidence to help face and overcome challenges. It all comes down to the support from your parents or other mentors and being given the opportunity to go after your passions.
On top of that, we’ve always encouraged our architecture students to take other classes that can broaden their perspective as it relates back to architecture — and pretty much to everything else in life. We also try to help them find every opportunity to go see the world firsthand, because architecture is not something you can teach just through textbooks and lectures. That was a key takeaway that not only gave us our competence, but also our freedom in our approach to education.
Can you share three things that most excite you about architecture? If you can please share a story or example.
Chris: The things that excite us about architecture are the wicked problems that we’re all confronting today. With both SHoP and Assembly OSM — our modular construction startup that aims to make high-rise construction faster, more efficient, and more affordable — the three considerations that contribute to our mission statement include:
Affordability — Everybody should have access to quality housing. Affordability is hard to reach these days because of the cost of construction and inflation in the supply chain.
Climate responsibility — Buildings have one of the highest carbon footprints within our country, so how can we mitigate that?
Labor equity — There are so many people who are endangered, underpaid, and underappreciated within the supply chain. People are always looking for cheaper ways to source things, but existing systems dictate that the only way they’re going to achieve that is at the cost of others having to work twice as hard. We need to find ways of coming together, in architecture, engineering, and construction, every day to do the vital work of improving on established and exploitative labor practices.
These three guiding topics apply to every aspect of the built environment. We’re able to tackle everything from residential projects to equitable public spaces to safe and enjoyable flexible workplaces to restaurant interiors in ways that are built to be less harmful to the environment, and the hard-working people who are involved in physical construction.
Can you share three things that most concern you about the industry? If you had the ability to implement 3 ways to reform or improve the industry, what would you suggest?
Bill: This answer ties directly back to the last question. It’s really about these ideas of wicked problems and how we use design thinking to solve them. These three areas — economic access, climate, and labor — have a direct impact on how we approach our profession and industry. It’s what drives us to innovate, this thinking about how we can act differently to improve the built environment.
Can you please share with our readers the “Five Things You Need To Know To Create A Highly Successful Career As An Architect?” If you can, please give a story or an example for each?
Bill & Chris: We’ve had the privilege of leading some incredible, globally renowned projects in the last couple of decades. And we learn new lessons every single time. For example, Uber HQ brought even more awareness to the significance of how fresh air and natural light and flexibility in a work environment can impact the flow of creativity and collaboration between employees — something that SHoP has been exploring for years that became an imperative consideration with the pandemic and the shift of more people working remotely. Working on the U.S. embassies in Milan and Bangkok has shown us the importance of being open-minded and respectfully interpretative when it comes to listening and learning and honoring cultural precedent in creating new international spaces.
Generally, we believe the following points are what have helped us succeed as architects: Be agile — Bureaucracy kills creativity and innovation.
Empathize — Try to appreciate your public, client, builder, and fabricator’s desires and needs.
Have a mission — Your staff wants a purpose. We all do. Wicked problems are a great catalyst for driving this.
Respect process — Design thinking allows us to take advantage of our diverse skills and generalist think tank approach to meet challenging problems. Process drives innovation.
Show your value — Don’t undersell the value you bring to the table, especially when it comes to how you mine, visualize, and share data in shaping and supporting critical decision-making and managing risk for clients.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
SHoP website: https://www.shoparc.com/
SHoP Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shoparchitects/
SHoP Twitter: https://twitter.com/shoparchitects
Assembly OSM website: https://assemblyosm.com/
Thank you for your time, and your excellent insights! We wish you continued success.
