The History of the Elevator Pitch

Ines Weizman (CDA/RCA)

2021, 5’

An elevator pitch is something you need to do fast. You need to grab the attention of an executive, a potential client, or a buyer – for this is a rare chance, perhaps your only chance – and you need to give your pitch amid a crowd of potentially eavesdropping strangers. This kind of situation is made possible by architecture; it points to the elevator not just as an architectural element, but as a medium. Every medium develops in relation to the world around it – to the technology, to the culture and financial realities within which it exists. The elevator as a medium has produced its own genre, the elevator pitch. Understood in this way, elevators provide a location in which class and viewpoints can be bridged, if only momentarily. They are the one element afforded to us by architecture for which we all need to stand and wait and in which opportunity is given. While the modern elevator could be understood as something that is hyper-standardised and entirely fungible, it is, as a medium, capable of unexpectedly producing a suspended moment of social encounter in which creative and norm-defying ideas are exchanged.