Six years before he died, Australia's famed modernist architect Harry Seidler gathered his colleagues around him. He told them that he wanted to do more lecturing and architectural photography around the world, and this meant he would be taking a step back from the business he had led for more than 40 years.
There are practices where they don't succeed after the lead goes, because that lead has never acknowledged the others.
Harry Seidler & Associates successfully continued on after Seidler died in 2006, but this was not without trials for those that remained.
'One of the things we suffered from for a while, once Harry was gone, was we effectively didn't exist,' says the principal architect at the firm, Greg Holman.
'You're still there ... in fact nothing much had really changed.
'We were still sitting here delivering a 55-story building in Brisbane and other various very large projects throughout Australia.'
At first, Holman says, people would ring the office and be surprised that there was anyone answering the phone, as if they too had vanished with Seidler's passing.
The business survived beyond its 50th year and remains a thriving firm.
Harry's wife and collaborator, Penelope Seidler, also continues to be involved in the firm, and people that worked alongside Harry for decades carry on his design aesthetic and approach to building.
The sudden death this year of Iraqi-born British architect Dame Zaha Hadid was grieved by the architectural community, not least the 400 staff who crafted and laboured over the hundreds of projects under her namesake firm's banner.
But what of the business? Entrusted with design and implementation contracts of many millions of dollars, could they go on without Hadid?
'There are practices where they don't succeed after the lead goes, because that lead has never acknowledged the others,' says Professor Sandra Kaji-O'Grady, head of University of Queensland's School of Architecture.
The main marker of a business's success after the loss of a star, Kaji-O'Grady says, is the degree of confidence that the lead architect has nurtured in their colleagues and underlings.
'The key word there is confidence. How has the lead architect instilled confidence in his employees? And that varies a great deal,' she says.
'With Zaha Hadid what has happened is her personal signature has become a shared brand.
'It's an approach, it's a brand, it's understood by everyone working in the office, so it was never the case over the last few years that she was originating all the projects. The way of working, the style of the work, the form-making, was adopted by the others.'
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University of Melbourne architectural researcher Dr Peter Raisbeck says that architectural firms have moved well beyond the fascination of the 'Starchitects' who dominated the design of so many of the iconic buildings of the 20th century.
'I think in the past, when the star architect in the heroic modern era died, things didn't quite go on, but in the current era the next kind of phase of architectural practice is more managerial,' said Raisbeck.
'Hadid's practice has numerous directors, numerous leader designers, many of whom are women—it's managerially large and well organised.'
But it is not always, as one imagines, the fault of the Starchitect that their collaborators and colleagues aren't given due credit.
'Often the lead architects is not wanting that—is trying to get acknowledgement for other people in the office—but there's something about the way architectural media works, that there's a preference for a single person, to try and understand it as genius rather than understand it as a collaborative effort,' she says.
'That really is quite damaging, I think, for the whole profession.'
Raisbeck says there are signs that collaborative architects are being acknowledged and awarded for their shared vision and work, rather than as a product of a genius.
'My hope is younger practices will collaborate more and adopt a different way of conducting architectural practice that isn't either reliant on a heroic architect or heroic brand or reliant on some kind of large managerial organisation,' he says.
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