Firm Foundations: Course Descriptions
At first glance, the roles you step into during Firm Foundations might feel like a stretch: running a firm, leading teams, managing clients, and making consequential decisions that shape projects and careers. These responsibilities often feel distant in the early years of practice.
Firm Foundations is designed to let you encounter these responsibilities early, safely, and experimentally through a sophisticated process of role-playing. Again and again, as participants live within these roles, they discover that what once felt intimidating quickly becomes engaging and energizing.
As the program unfolds, uncertainty gives way to clarity. Participants experience a sense of agency and possibility. By the end of the program, the business and leadership dimensions of practice feel far more approachable, and participants are better equipped to imagine and shape their own futures.
Studio Startup
Launch and run a simulated practice while learning how firms balance creativity, business realities, and long-term vision.
Studio Startup is a simulation-based course in which participants collaborate to launch and operate a fictional architecture practice within a realistic, competitive marketplace. Working in small teams, participants define their firm’s mission, business model, areas of expertise, target clients, and internal culture.
Participants set priorities around profitability, design excellence, growth, and work–life balance, then experience how those choices play out over time. Participants engage with simulated clients, pursue project opportunities, assess feasibility, and decide which commissions to accept or decline. They track income and expenses, manage a firm bank account, and navigate the budgetary realities that shape professional decision-making.
Along the way, participants develop judgment around client fit, risk assessment, and long-term growth. They learn to read client personalities, anticipate challenges, and recognize strategic opportunities – gaining insight into how successful practices are actually built and sustained.
Integrity
Navigate the human dynamics and nuanced decisions that shape client relationships and guide projects toward success.
Integrity is a narrative-driven course that immerses participants in the life of a single architectural project, as seen from multiple perspectives. Through a richly developed story, participants step inside the dynamics of a project team as it works with a network of stakeholders, including clients, consultants, fabricators, community voices, and competing interests.
As each chapter unfolds, participants encounter a new phase in the project’s development, along with challenges that test not only technical competence, but judgment and values. These dilemmas rarely have clean solutions. Participants must weigh competing priorities such as schedule, budget, relationships, design quality, and long-term impact – while deciding how to move forward.
The course emphasizes logistical reasoning, professional integrity, design excellence, and relational intelligence, helping participants understand how client trust is built, damaged, and repaired over the life of a project, and how decision-making shapes both project outcomes and a firm’s reputation.
Team Builder
Step into an office leadership role and learn how healthy teams are built, supported and sustained.
Team Builder is a staff management-focused simulation in which participants assume responsibility for a struggling satellite office within a large corporate architecture firm. Over a simulated period of years, participants work to stabilize, rebuild, and grow the office while balancing staff well-being with financial performance.
Participants manage a diverse set of project teams, learning to understand individual strengths, working styles, aspirations, and blind spots. They allocate staff to projects, address collaboration breakdowns, and respond to interpersonal conflicts. As the office evolves, participants hire new employees: reviewing résumés and portfolios, conducting interviews, negotiating salaries, and making strategic decisions about team composition.
The course builds practical insight into team and office leadership, mentoring, delegation, and organizational culture.
Find Your Path
Integrate your experiences in the program, clarify emerging strengths, and develop a more intentional professional direction.
Find Your Path is the culminating course of the Firm Foundations program. It brings together the insights, frameworks, and experiences from the preceding courses and turns them inward through structured reflection and personalized guidance.
Participants revisit the concepts explored throughout the program and use them as tools for self-understanding and career exploration. The course recognizes that no two professionals – and no two careers – follow the same trajectory.
As part of the course, participants complete aptitude and personality assessments that illuminate cognitive style, sensitivities, values, and priorities. They engage in a guided career-planning process that explores possible future directions, areas of curiosity, and strategic next steps. Each participant also receives individualized feedback and mentoring, resulting in a clearer, more grounded sense of how to move forward with intention.