Architects are on target with a new name
Go searching for architect Greg Wattier and eventually you land on a website that says: “It’s just bigger than me now.” End of website and hello Slingshot Architecture.
Nope, no broken windows here, and any bull’s-eye to be found probably is in the mind’s eye of Wattier and partner David Voss. Graduate school buddies, they have worked together in Greater Des Moines after arriving here from disparate locales.
For the last two or three years, they have tried to come up with a name for their firm that captures their business philosophy and their design process. The old company name, ge Wattier Architecture Inc., just wasn’t doing it.
“We started trying to get a handle on expressing how we worked, but not changing how we worked,” Wattier said. “We needed a name that captured our processes and approaches.”
The surprising thing about the name change was that it didn’t catch old clients off guard, Wattier said in a blog posting.
After kicking around ideas and trying to get their thoughts centered and on paper, Wattier and Voss decided to bring in 8/7 Central Inc., the East Village screen printing and website design firm, thinking that even without a name, the new firm at least needed a website.
The folks at 8/7 Central helped focus the conversations.
So what’s in the name? It represents a process summarized this way: pullback, momentum, impact. Wattier and Voss said they spend as much or more time “pulling back” and analyzing a potential job than they do in the design itself. The momentum is expressed through “design bursts.” The impact can be felt in a bold response to a complicated job.
Voss noted that the firm occasionally loses a client during the pullback, but at least the client can find a designer that works best for them. And that’s just the way things should be, both men said.
The firm’s clients are dotted across downtown and throughout Greater Des Moines. It currently has left the pullback stage and is moving into the momentum stage in the redesign of the downtown fire station at Ninth and Mulberry streets for the Des Moines Social Club.
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