Time To Take A Swing

Kansas City Star 

The Kansas City Star sent Steve Paul to the Crossroads loft where Pendulum started, and photographer Shane Keyser found the two founders at the third floor windows with the downtown skyline behind them. The headline was about timing: two architects stepping to the plate in the middle of an economic freefall.

Jonathan O’Neil Cole and Devan Case had both come out of large practices, Cole most recently from sports work at 360 Architecture and Case from BNIM, and they had worked together at HNTB before that. They opened Pendulum Studio in borrowed space and then moved into the loft. The bet was that a downturn was exactly the moment to put a mark on the marketplace rather than wait for one. Backing came from Frank Carson III and his son Jeff Carson of the Carson Bank in Mulvane, Kansas, who agreed to stand behind the new venture after seeing the office for the first time.

Weeks before the article ran, Pendulum had won the design of a $12 million ballpark in Normal, Illinois, beating several larger firms including two the founders had previously worked for. That project opened as The Corn Crib.

The piece also put a number on something the profession rarely says out loud. The American Institute of Architects counted roughly 1,500 African American architects at the time, under 1.5 percent of the 102,000 registered professionals in the United States. Cole framed it as a responsibility: design leaders in a community owe that community an opinion.

Asked about starting a firm in a downturn, he repeated the line his father gave him: “timing is everything.”

Source: “Time to Take a Swing” by Steve Paul, The Kansas City Star, with photography by Shane Keyser.

The framework Pendulum uses to judge a venue as a long term civic and financial system is set out in S.C.O.R.E.