Architects are good at building brands without people noticing that thats what they are doing, but mostly bad at capitalizing on them by doing mass produced items, such as furniture collections or hardware elements.
The Slate article below covers a very interesting topic but the conclusions are completely wrong.
“neither Foster nor Piano has a house style; their designs vary considerably from project to project”
If anyone has a house style, it is Foster. When I was there someone nearly got fired for not specifying the wrong door handles on a building – they weren’t Elementer.
The main reason that Foster or Piano buildings vary in style is that they didnt design them all – if you are a big architecture practice its just not possible for the founder to design everything. That not deception, just a function of scale. What keeps the integrity of design is precisely the house style.
Unfortunately, in the same way that art historians squabble over whether a Rembrant is authentic (as if there were a clear boundary) because they desperately want to believe in the myth of authorship, the same is true of architects, and that is precisely why they have strong brands. People want to believe in signatures.