Tag: Anniversary

Pendulum Celebrates 13 Year Anniversary!

May 18, 2020 was the 13th anniversary of the launch of Pendulum.  Under normal circumstances we’d be gearing up for an amazing party with friends and close collaborators but these aren’t normal times with COVID-19 forcing the globe to proceed with caution.

Even though we can’t gather together in one place, our CEO Jonathan O’Neil Cole shared a few words about what this year means to him.

Many thanks to our staff, clients, close collaborators for fueling our ability to keep swinging.

Shout outs:

Behr Productions – music score

 

Incorporation Day – Seven Year Anniversary!

Project Collage

When Devan and I started Pendulum the industry standard was three years before you’d be considered a real business.  As the economic downturn reared its ugly head five years was the new normal…and now we hear ten is what it takes before the industry takes you seriously.  Well, 5/18/2014 made seven years in the game and the Pendulum is still swinging.  Are we real?  I guess that depends on who you talk to, but as the resident realist I will say that it has been an honor to contribute to the built environment with the projects featured in the collage above.  In behalf of our naysayers and despite our reputation for upsetting the apple cart I suppose we’ll hold off on having any major parties until year ten, but in the meantime we’ll keep grinding, hustling, competing, growing, and broadening our horizons…the next evolution for us is right around the corner.

Many thanks to all of our families, friends, staff, clients, and collaborators for inspiring us to keep it moving.

Hello world!

The Month of May is special for Pendulum Studio – my business partner and I decided to hang our own shingle on May 18, 2007 (Incorporation Day), My wife and I tied the knot May 30, 1998, we’ll move into our new office space May 2011.  As we continue to reach new milestones in our careers it only seems appropriate to launch our blog in our favorite month of the year.

We’ll save random thoughts for our twitter posts and instead “break ice” with dialogue centered around issues we encounter while practicing architecture during troubled economic times – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

It’s been reported that there are over 400 unemployed architects in the Kansas City metro alone and the numbers are climbing. Firms that have been considered household names for the past 25 years (affectionately referred to as the 800 pound gorillas) have started to bleed – there’s just not enough bananas to go around.  Principal Owner’s of these firms are adopting guerilla warfare tactics just to stay alive.  The “client pool” is becoming harder and harder to secure on the long term – fueled by the desperation of the profession.  The “client pool” treats “us” (architects in general) as second class citizens because guess what…”if we don’t like it, there’s always another architect out there willing to do the work and live to die another day” – which says something about “us” (yet another topic for discussion).

As my business partner often says  – “It’s tough out there”, yet we are still aggressively optimistic.  We are living in the era of the “market challenger” – it’s time for us to be smarter,  faster and more agile while conducting better business in general.  It’s time for all of “us” to ingest a healthy dose of “get right” (as my father often says), and bring value back to this devalued profession.