Communicating the business of architecture: how a global architecture firm mediates design and business through social media

Purpose The article examines how a globally recognised architecture firm uses social media to mediate between design considerations and the commercial, institutional and professional constraints of practice. Design/methodology/approach The study involved qualitative content analysis and multimodal analysis of firm-authored posts by Snøhetta on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook. The dataset covers September 2023 to October 2024 and comprises 345 leading images with their captions and a gallery subset of 75 posts. We use inductive coding and multimodal analysis to understand how these posts demonstrate symbolic capital. Findings Images posted by Snøhetta are predominantly used to communicate design ideas; written captions are used to integrate business themes. Recurring alignments between image and caption suggest a consistent division of labour between the two modes wherein design is carried visually, business is carried textually. We describe this as a multimodal compartmentalisation of design and business. Originality/value The article brings a multimodal lens to understanding symbolic capital in architectural practice, showing that the separation of design and business ideas across image and caption supports a firm's aesthetic authority while simultaneously conducting commercial communication. It contributes the concept of multimodal compartmentalisation and an analytical approach that can be extended to other firms, sectors and platforms. Previous work has located the field's symbolic capital in architectural competitions and magazines. We locate a comparable effect in the continuous, self-authored stream of social media.