Dream Teams

From a songwriting duo to engineers who spawn doe-eyed robots, meet four pairs who define—and defy—the terms of a creative partnership.

By Carlin Flora, published on May 01, 2008 - last reviewed on January 09, 2009

A stellar team is greater than the sum of its individuals' ideas—from the Beatles to Google to Regis and Kelly, the world teems with proof of this exponential synergy.

Ultimately, the magic behind innovative duos comes down to a few key ingredients: The pair usually has a shared vision, and complementary talents and temperaments. "If one scientist is theoretical and the other is a great lab administrator, they can be very productive," says Vera John-Steiner, a University of New Mexico professor and the author of Creative Collaboration.

A careful balance of encouragement and criticism enables creative partners to bring out the best in each other. In the beginning stages of a project, John-Steiner says, the ideas need to flow freely, but great duos must help each other find the "rough diamond" in the brainstorm. And they must give each other honest feedback: "A sense of timing with regard to criticism is so important, because partners are emotionally as well as intellectually interdependent."

Teams that work and sleep together may have a double-edged partnership. Though the collaboration can be especially exciting, with time it can lead to a sense of certainty about a partner's ideas—a danger, says John-Steiner, since the freedom to explore new territory is a requisite to creativity.

Dividing the bounty from shared endeavors is often difficult, but the rewards of connectedness can surpass individual glory. A signature benefit of collaboration is that it enables each person to be more daring, because the risk is spread out between them. Two people can challenge the prevailing wisdom in their field more comfortably than a solo operator. PT profiles four duos that have gone the distance.

Master Builders: Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown

A McDonald's arch sits astride the grand entrance to the Philadelphia home of architectural titans Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. The living room is crammed with neon signs from long-gone Vegas casinos. But the couple is unlikely to be mistaken for a pair of Americana-obsessed retirees, given their mantra that "context is everything." The signs sit atop antique furniture picked up on trips to France and Spain, and the dining room ceiling is stenciled with names of the greats: Bach, Beethoven, Michelangelo.

Bob and Denise, are collaborators who've been cast in the role of rebels—a distinction they sometimes embrace and sometimes dislike. They believe they complement each other superbly, though the world hasn't always been eager to acknowledge them as a team. And their work and homelife are seamless: They spend most of their time at their firm, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and come home to eat supper side by side, while watching their favorite BBC comedies.

Considered among the most influential architects of the last century, Bob and Denise have earned accolades even as their radical perspectives—a preference for "the ugly and ordinary" over the "heroic and original"—enraged critics and colleagues. They began exchanging ideas when they met in 1960 and have been official collaborators since they married seven years later. They play with popular symbolism (the bank they designed in Celebration, Florida, looks like a 1950s hamburger stand) and over-the-top effects: Venturi famously stated, "Less is a bore," in response to the modernist mantra "Less is more."

On planning jobs—a university campus layout, for example—Denise takes the lead, whereas on architecture projects, Bob is usually the head designer. "Bob has an intuitive approach to design," says Heather Clark, a long-time architect at their firm, "while Denise is more thoughtful. She brings a broader way of thinking to the project. She's the one who will say things such as, 'Where will the coffee pot go?'"

Venturi, for his part, says that the two work in parallel. "We each combine a rational, pragmatic way of solving the problem at hand with a kind of jumping-all-over, nonrational approach."

The office atmosphere can get tense when Bob and Denise disagree. "A lot of times they both have ideas, and they want to get them out there, and one feels they're interrupting the other," Clark says. "Bob can be very dramatic—intentionally so. They push each other, so in the end the design is much stronger than if one person had done it."

"Bob's an Italian opera character in Brooks Brothers clothing," opines Denise. "Being married gives us twice the opportunity for abrasion. But it also makes life more graphic, vital, vivid, and intense. And if you don't argue, good things don't come out."

"Denise takes Bob places that he does not otherwise go," says their son, James, who is making a documentary about the two. "And then Bob will go deep in those areas, but so will Denise, so they are very complementary."

If he hadn't met Denise, Bob wouldn't have looked to pop art for inspiration—she took him to Las Vegas to show him how to view kitsch through the lens of architectural history, and on that trip they fell in love.

But to build their firm, they had to capitalize on Bob's reputation as a design wizard—a strategy that exacerbated a continuing problem for the pair: Bob repeatedly received credit in the press for their joint work. Denise attributes the snubs to sexism, as well as to a "star system" in architecture that wanted to uphold the myth of the solitary genius.