Over the last sixteen years Metaphor has worked exclusively in the cultural sector, rethinking and replanning museums, redisplaying exhibitions, and turning historic landscapes and city quarters into successful visitor destinations. We work all over the world, at every scale and for every audience.
Our skills include visioning, masterplanning, architecture, design, story-planning, text writing, content research, financial sustainability, brief writing, facilitating workshops, consultation and working with funders and the HLF.
We offer a unique blend of interpretation and design expertise, and our content team act as a bridge between your curators and our designers. This makes us particularly good at the blend of imagination, vision and analysis that underpins new cultural projects and makes them happen.
The Metaphor team is led by its two founding directors, Stephen Greenberg and Rachel Morris. Other members of the Metaphor team include the Associates Dmitri Martin and Su Koh; the designers, Angie Bessho, Kara Dickinson, Rebecca Lee, Mark McLeod and Carlos Peters; and our writer, researcher and interpretation manager Helen Schulte.
Stephen founded Metaphor in 2000. He is a fully qualified architect with over 30 years experience, and hIs wide expertise is one of the reasons that Metaphor can offer an unusually broad range of skills. He has both big vision but also attention to detail; this is one of the factors that ensures that Metaphor delivers powerful and memorable Visitor Experiences.
As director, Stephen has overseen the making of a prestigious body of work at Metaphor, including major blockbuster exhibitions (at the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert and the Guggenheim Bilbao); the masterplans of museums and cultural quarters (including the Victoria & Albert, three members of the Science Group and the historic peninsula in Istanbul) and the redisplay of entire museums (such as the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Order of St John in London). Metaphor’s recreation of the Olympic Museum in Lausanne opened in December 2013. Among other projects, Metaphor is currently working on 11 new galleries in the National Museum of Scotland.
Stephen’s exceptional career has included a period as Editor of the Architects Journal, as a partner in the international architecture firm DEGW, and as a partner and director in Greenberg and Hawkes Architects.
Stephen is the public face of Metaphor, and presents Metaphor’s work to trustees, directors, politicians and NGOs. He lectures and speaks regularly around the world; at universities and design schools including the Scuole Normale e Superiore in Pisa, Italy and the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK and at museums’ conferences. He writes for and has been published in numerous architecture and design magazines, and has won many design and architecture awards and competitions.
sasha amaya 