Scalar Architecture: Urban scale, small world
Julio Salcedo, principal of architecture firm Scalar Architecture, is taking back the word generic. He uses the word freely, and to him, especially when coupled with the term generative, it doesn't mean bland and personalityfree.
Photo courtesy Scalar Architecture
Houser Walker Architecture: Half a glass, full plate Whatever Gregory Walker, AIA, and Hank Houser, AIA, bring to the mix that makes up their seven-person firm, it's working, and despite equivalent shares of optimism and pessimism, they're both equally surprised at their success.
Photo courtesy Houser Walker Architecture
PRA: Young power players in China
Meet Philippe Rondeau, a Frenchman who has joined up with a Chinese partner, Li Yun, to make
his mark on the Eastern skyline.
Photo courtesy PRA
wHY: It’s a rhetorical question
With a museum under its belt and a full plate of work, the Los Angeles–based firm wHY doesn’t have cause for doubt, but still keeps questioning.
Photo courtesy wHY
Redtop Architects: Three Heads Are Better
When the three founders of Redtop Architects, met while working for a New York firm, they found that they had a lot more in common than red hair. "We had a mutual admiration for each other," says Shakespeare, "as well as a similar aesthetic and goals."
Photo courtesy Electric Dreams
Electric Dreams:
Wake up! The phrase "Swedish design" calls up images of spare spaces laid by careful masons or rendered from local woods. Not mini-spectacles, such as the ceiling of Pleasant Bar in Stockholm, which is covered in convex security mirrors. "We often get that comment, that we're not what one expects from a Swedish design studio," says Joel Degermark, one half of Electric Dreams.
Photo courtesy Electric Dreams
Grzywinski Pons Architects takes Manhattan
Challenged with the constraints of working within New York City, including laying the foundations for a hotel just 29 inches above a subway line, Grzywinski Pons Architects have defined their design approach based on their location.
Photo courtesy Grzywinski Pons Architects
Bauenstudio: Exploring container and contained
Some young architects feel it's time to start their solo practices when they have a client. Others wait until they win a competition. For Marc Roehrle and Mo Zell, both happy circumstances came to pass, one after the other, and, in 2006, Boston-based Bauenstudio was born.
Photo courtesy Bauenstudio
Architecture in Formation: Dream projects, all real
When architect Matthew Bremer, AIA, isn’t busy designing cool projects like a VIP lounge in New York’s JFK Airport, a showroom for an upscale purveyor of Brazilian design, Manhattan apartments, or the redevelopment of a 103,000-square-foot former prison site in Brooklyn, New York, he’s working on his dream project—developing his family’s ranch land in Bulverde, Texas, into a walkable, modern, mixed-use community. “It doesn’t matter where you are,” says Bremer, “the Texas creeps back into your blood.”
Photo courtesy Architecture in Formation
Techentin Buckingham Architecture: Keeping it real-world
Techentin Buckingham will pass on paper architecture. The Los Angeles studio, founded by college friends Warren Techentin, AIA, and Henry Buckingham, AIA, has focused its six years so precisely on real-world building that the partners only recently decided to enter one competition annually—if only to keep staff spirits high and creative juices flowing.
Photo courtesy Techentin Buckingham Architecture
LeanArch: Adding whimsy to sophisticated design
He doesn’t wear a cape, but architect James Meyer, AIA, principal of Los Angeles firm LeanArch, has a superhero thing going on nonetheless. Having started his solo practice in 2000 with small projects like bathroom remodels and room additions, Meyer says he began his fledgling firm with a passionate concept.
Photo courtesy LeanArch
The Galante Architecture Studio
When you come from a family of builders, what choice is there but to be an architect? For Theodore Galante, AIA, his family members'
capacity to make things both inspired and contributed to what he calls a "mystic assumption" that he'd follow that route.
Photo courtesy The Galante Architecture Studio
KRDB: The art of the deal
How does a guy with a degree in finance from Michigan State University end up as principal of an architecture firm in Austin, Texas? “Currency arbitrage just wasn’t giving me a creative outlet,” laughs Chris Krager, principal of Austin-based KRDB. “I did the banking thing for four years. That was enough.” Krager moved to Austin to seek a degree in architecture. “I wanted to build, and the University of Texas had a good balance of theory and practice.”
Photo courtesy KRDB
Tom Allisma: Developing a taste
Omaha is better known as the heart of corn country than as a hotbed of architectural design, but it has proved fertile ground for one young designer. Tom Allisma, Assoc. AIA, balances teaching interior design; acting as principal of his design firm, Tom Allisma Productions; developing concepts; and designing restaurants and bars, which he and his business partners also finance.
Photo courtesy Tom Allisma Productions
David Yum Architects: Appreciating complexities
When architect David Yum started his own practice, David Yum Architects, in New York City, in 2000, he was eager, enthusiastic, and confident that success would be imminent.
Photo courtesy David Yum Architects
Beckmann N’Thépé: Exceptional in Paris
Despite the obstacles, Françoise N'Thépé and Aldric Beckmann, founders of Paris-based firm Beckmann-N'Thépé, started in 2002, has already been able to amass one of the most impressive collections of new work in Paris.
Oyler Wu Collaborative: Layers and texture
Their resume reads like an architect’s fairy tale: two aspiring architects, Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, met at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, graduated, and moved to New York to hone their craft working with prestigious architects and firms—he for Toshiko Mori and Lebbeus Woods, she for Architecture Research Office and Gluckman Mayner Architects.
Photo courtesy Oyler Wu Collaborative
Studio ST: From inside to the ground up
When Israeli architect Esther Sperber left Pei Partnership Architects to strike out on her own with Studio ST in 2003, she was excited, nervous, and up to the challenge. “Having the opportunity to work so closely with Mr. Pei was amazing,” she says.
Photo courtesy Studio ST
De Leon + Primmer Architecture
A flurry of recent commissions validated the decision of De Leon + Primmer Architecture’s principals to return to Louisville, Kentucky after relocating to Charlotte, North Carolina.
Photo courtesy De Leon & Primmer Architecture
Caliper Studio: Making it with metal
For New York City firm Caliper Studio, it’s the making that gives them passion, as they combine design services with metal fabrication.
Photo courtesy Caliper studio
Montalba Architects: An optimistic approach
David Montalba, AIA, has done a lot and gained a lot of mentors in his scant 35 years on the planet. As well as working for several prominent Los Angeles–based architecture firms—Gehry Partners, Pugh+Scarpa, Daly Genik, among others—Montalba has succeeded in making a name for his three-year-old firm, Montalba Architects, in a region that is, well, lousy with quality architects.
Photo courtesy Montalba Architects
Pique: Three architects, one vision
When architect Peter Jahnke says that he has to stare at Eric Meglasson, his partner and coprincipal of architecture firm Pique, all day, he means it, but not in the way you might think. Peter, Eric, and the firm’s third coprincipal, Keith Ballantyne , live and work in different parts of the world, but together share one practice.
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Tina Manis: Equal parts family and firm
“It’s hard, it’s frustrating, it’s wonderful, and it’s exciting.” Tina Manis is talking about the office she started three years ago and runs today, but could be just as easily describing raising a family. A young mother, Manis is in a position that is still surprisingly rare in the architecture field: She is the sole, female owner of an architecture firm whose two employees are also women.
PEG office of landscape + architecture
Ann Arbor, Michigan, a breeding ground for talented young architects? Not only does this month’s featured Design firm hail from there, but so do two practices introduced in archrecord2 in 2002 (IS.Ar Iwamoto Scott Architecture, in April, and PLY Architecture + Design, in August) and a record Design Vanguard firm from 2005 (Mitnick Roddier Hicks).
assemblage+ : To love and design in L.A.
For David Thompson and Kevin Southerland, principals of Los Angeles-based firm assembledge+, early influences have had a direct impact on the direction their nine-year-old, six-person firm is taking.
