Turns out that architects do live as fabulously — or at least photograph as severely — as those Banana Republic ads would have you believe. And as Robin Pogrebin reports in today's Times, they're now taking the word "partner" to mean things that would have totally made McKim, Mead, and White blush:

Like partners in any other architecture firm, married couples design together, make business decisions together, meet with developers as a team and travel to building sites in tandem. Interviews with some couples suggest that it can be tricky. There are the perceptions of the outside world to contend with: the idea that men are muscular masters of tectonics, and women, glorified interior decorators. There are the strains of heavy travel and long days while working and living together, and the potential for design arguments to escalate into marital power struggles.

Muscular masters. Strains. Design arguments. Escalation. It only gets hotter after the jump.

Take man-wife partners Dan Wood and Amale Andraos. Insomuch as most words about architecture are dirty euphemisms these days, the bounds of matrimony seem to ensure that no wiggle is ever just a wiggle:

She cited a space they designed for an exhibition last summer on Pier 40 on the Hudson about public spaces for recreation. Ms. Andraos thought of creating a sloping platform divided into five separate spaces: the Cultured City, the Fun City, the Healthy City, the Connected City and the 24-Hour City. Mr. Wood came up with what they called "the wiggle": an undulating wall under the platform to define the spaces.

For budget reasons, the entire platform was deleted, leaving the wiggle exposed. She proposed making the wiggle out of fabric and hanging it; he suggested cuts in the fabric to create entrances and views; and then she suggested striping the fabric, with alternating panels for video and text. "This is really how we work," Ms. Andraos said. "It is a back and forth where ideas don't exclude each other in an either-or, with a winning scheme and a losing one, but rather where ideas build on each other to the point where one of them surfaces as the big one — almost taking the lead — allowing for the others to be nested within it."

Unfortunately, the lady half of such pairings are often cattily assumed to have nested their ways to top, though the fact that man architects have a CAD-drenched love of shiny new things can't help matters:

Although Billie Tsien is now a major name, she has dealt with some traditional skepticism. She met her husband, Tod Williams, in 1977, when, fresh out of architecture school, she applied for a job at his firm. He was 11 years older, just coming off a divorce and playing the field. They started dating six months after she joined the firm. Both worried that as a result she would never be taken seriously.
...
That is not to say it was easy for Ms. Diller to begin her career by collaborating with her husband. In 1975 she studied under Mr. Scofidio; he was about 40, she was 21. They started dating about a year later, moved in together in 1979 and became professional partners in 1981.

How sexy can procreating the built environment be, you ask?

Ms. Hoang and Mr. Bunge, partners innArchitects, keep two blackboards in the dining area of their Flatiron district apartment so they can jump up from the dinner table to draw. At the young firm Obra, Pablo Castro describes his alliance with Jennifer Lee as "a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week architectural commando unit."

They often discuss design strategy deep into the night "until one of us passes out in the middle of a sentence," he said. "The next morning, as soon as she opens an eye, Jennifer can pick up and complete the thought without missing a beat while I struggle trying to remember what it was we were talking about."

But just when you thought giving Carol Brady half of Mike's drafting pencil was radical, along comes another Peter Eisenman-esque deconstruction of norms:

Over the last two years Mr. Scofidio and Ms. Diller's coupled template has been tested by the arrival of a new partner, Charles Renfro. Diller & Scofidio has become Diller, Scofidio & Renfro, appending a third voice with equal clout to their tight husband-and-wife alliance. "It's kind of a couple and a gay guy," Ms. Diller said.

Kind of? One can only imagine the wiggle micropolitics going on in that threesome. —Jon

Couples Who Build More Than Relationships [NYT]