I read an article in Barron’s that gave me a new insight onto a project I had written the summary for. The article was about CVS/Caremark, and it mentioned that the company had become CVS/Caremark in 2007 when CVS, a retail pharmacy chain, acquired Caremark, a pharmacy-benefit management (PBM) company. The article hinted at the synergies that this acquisition promised. My client, a mid-sized architecture and planning firm on the North Shore, had designed an enlarged corporate headquarters campus that provided training facilities and a centralized call center to support the regions stores, and also the other side of the new business entity. This was a lucrative opportunity for this firm, and they landed it at the beginning of the new phase of the company’s life. Mergers and acquisitions are important occurrences because they create new needs for management and work force. These could be new demands on existing space, or need for larger, newer, greener space.
In our work, we aim to understand these needs because they underlie everything about a new design project – from how it looks to who it serves to how well it goes together. You should know that this is part of the story of your work. This will help you know how to tell people what the value of your work is — whether the value is in the physical design or in the materials and sound construction that ensure that it stands for decades.
