Early in my architecture, design, and teaching careers, I was given business cards by each of my employers. Langdon Woodhouse Architects, Perkins & Will, Pappageorge Haymes, Crate & Barrel, and the Illinois Institute of Technology Department of Architecture all supplied me with business cards that included my name, title, and a way to contact me.

At a certain point in my work life, I decided I needed my own business cards, an identity, a personal brand, but what type of architect and/or designer was I, and how might I translate nearly 20 years’ worth of post-graduate school professional work into a business card and some stationary?

Throughout the architecture profession’s history, the gentlemanly architect has been distancing themself from the not so gentlemanly builder, craftsman, workman and/or laborer. As far back as the mid-1400’s, Leon Battista Alberti wrote… “Before I go any further, however, I think I should explain exactly whom I mean by architect: for it is no carpenter that I would have you compare to the greatest exponents of other disciplines; the carpenter is but an instrument in the hands of the architect.”

By the mid-1950’s, the Bauhaus School’s Walter Gropius argued for a different kind of architect writing…“Knowledge will only come by individual experience. At the start, basic design and shop practice combined should introduce to the students the elements of design, surface, volume, space, color, and simultaneously the ideas of construction, of building, by developing three-dimensional exercises to be carried out with materials and tools. In succeeding years of training, the design and construction studio, supplemented by field experience during summer vacations, will coordinate further experience with the broadening of knowledge. Construction should be taught as part of design, for they are directly interdependent...”

My first Carhartt jacket purchase was influenced as much by hip-hop fashion as it was a conscious decision on my part to reinforce a belief, that I wasn’t, and didn’t want to be, Alberti’s gentleman architect, I was, and intended to be, a Gropius/Bauhaus designer maker. Like a superhero’s costume, my Carhartt jacket gave me a kind of architect, designer, maker, superpower or at least the placebo effect of super making powers which was all I really needed for the proper mindset at that time.

My original Paul Pettigrew logo and corporate identity was designed by Jason Pickleman of JNL Graphic Design. At that time, I primarily thought about a business card that was visually appealing, but I wasn’t thinking about brand, branding, and incorporating my “identity” as an architect and designer. My business address was changing, and a new type of contact information needed to be added to my identity, i.e., an email address. So, it was time to change both contact details and address the bigger picture my identity as an architect and designer.

As I studied furniture design history, I discovered that historians were often able to identify and authenticate the designer of a piece of furniture by way of the manufacturer’s brand, which was during the arts and crafts period, a branding iron applied and burnt into the wood brand, and during the modern period, an applied decal or label. I thought it would be cool to use a branding iron to brand my custom furniture designs and applied patches and decals to brand just about everything else. I asked a couple of my clients about my branding iron idea and received enthusiastic reassurances that this would be a unique way to identify their furniture as authentic Paul Pettigrew Architect designed (& very often fabricated) furniture.

The reason my business address was changing, was that I had relinquished my home office (and music listening room) to my daughter. Upon my daughter’s birth, I temporarily moved my office (and music system) into our living room, an arrangement that worked in the short term, but proved unsustainable in the long term. I no longer had “my” office, or “my” room, I now had “our” home office and “our” room, and I no longer had “my” music I now had “our” music.

I don’t know if it’s true of all music loving parents, but incrementally, I was no longer listening to or buying “my” music, I was now buying and playing “our” music, as I attempted to discover the music my daughter might like best. Back then I could search the internet with the query “Kid’s music that doesn’t suck” and find numerous postings by parents like me who weren’t happy with what the Wiggles and Barney were offering. Most of the albums I eventually purchased and played appeared on these lists. Now, 15 years later, when I query Google for “Kid’s music that doesn’t suck” there are even more options.

In heavy rotation back in the early 2000’s was: Jack Johnson’s Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies for the film Curious George, Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, Art Garfunkel’s Song’s From A Parent to a Child, Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films, The Beatles Yellow Submarine Soundtrack, The Partridge Family, The Monkees, Dave Brubeck’s Dave Dig’s Disney, David Grisman & Jerry Garcia’s Not For Kids Only, The Roches, They Might be Giants Here Come the ABCs and Here Come the 123s, They Might Be Giants Here Comes Science, They Might Be Giants No!, Tally Hall’s Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum, and because I’m a slightly flawed parent, Lilly Allen’s Alright, Still and It’s Not Me, It’s You.

About 6 months after my daughter’s birth, a young couple with a similarly aged daughter moved into our condominium building. As luck would have it, ½ of the newly arrived couple was Ana Schedler Brennan of Schedler Brennan design + consulting, a graphic designer who expressed an interest in helping me with my new branding in exchange for my design services helping to design a shelving system for her family’s over-flowing collection of books (a design debt I’ve yet to pay back).

Ana & I worked together to put together a literal and figurative brand that was both functional, structural, and beautiful. There really wasn’t much of a budget so the idea that one design could be a branding iron, an embroidered patch, a business card, a sticker to apply to envelopes as a return address, and a larger sticker that could be applied to oversized envelopes, packages, and tubes of drawings, was both a creative design solution and a necessity.

Color was ultimately inspired by the white, black, and red (Pantone Super Warm Red) preferred by Massimo Vignelli, a favorite designer of mine at the time. As Massimo Vignelli explained (no doubt on behalf of most architects), "Black has class. It’s the best color. There is no other color that is better than black. There are many others that are appropriate and happy, but those colors belong on flowers. Black is a color that is man-made. It is really a projection of the brain. It is a mind color. It is intangible. It is practical. It works 24 hours a day. In the morning or afternoon, you can dress in tweed, but in the evening, you look like a professor who escaped from college. Everything else has connotations that are different, but black is good for everything."

I wanted the concept supporting Paul Pettigrew Architect’s identity to be related to a theory of design I initially explored during my thesis time at MIT and had been working on ever since. I wanted an identity that could work at multiple scales, i.e., logo + additional white space & info. = business card, business card plus additional white space = mailing label, mailing label + additional space = letterhead/custom gridded sketch pad. The smallest branding element (a custom letter “P”) would have a presence within the largest branding element as both letter and logo and the largest branding element (letterhead/custom gridded sketch pad) incorporated the smallest element as both letter and logo.

I wanted my brand or logo to have the ability to be “site” specific, i.e., embroidered patches could be sewn onto hats, jackets, and/or backpacks, and stickers could be stuck to just about anything anywhere.

My business card could even be enlarged to the scale of a construction site sign. Branding logo elements were modular and scalable in a way that very much mimicked what I was trying to achieve in my functional object and architectural designs at that time and really for the past 20 years post graduate school thesis.

Eventually, I ordered my custom-made electric branding iron and promptly went about branding every functional object I’d designed and made that was still in my possession. I make a distinction between architects and artists. In my mind, an architect, a designer of buildings, and a designer and maker of things smaller than buildings, is constantly working with function, and often, function as it relates to humans and human needs/desires. As a collector of art, I was always aware of the artists signature, its location, and the signature's relation to the artwork. I saw my brand, and the act of branding as a kind of artist’s signature. There's something gratifying and exciting about designing and making something, plugging in my branding iron, waiting for the iron to heat up, then watching the smoke rise from the functional objects surface.

There’s a song on Jack Johnson’s Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies for the film Curious George called With My Own Two Hands. Each time I played With My Own Two Hands for my daughter, the song reminded me of why I wanted to be an architect ever since I was the age that my daughter was at the time the Curious George album came out (6 years old in case you were wondering).

The lyrics of With My Own Two Hands revisit, at both the level of a child and parent, the age-old argument between Leon Battista Alberti’s “gentleman” architect and Walter Gropius’ “carpenter” architect and attempt to answer the question why architecture, why design, and/or why teach.

I can change the world
With my own two hands
Make it a better place
With my own two hands
Make it a kinder place
With my own two hands

I can make peace on earth
With my own two hands
I can clean up the earth
With my own two hands
I can reach out to you
With my own two hands

I'm going to make it a brighter place
With my own two hands
I'm going to make it a safer place
With my own two hands
I'm going to help the human race
With my own two hands

With my own
With my own two hands
With my own
With my own two hands