An apt illustration of Adam Sokol’s architectural philosophy is his Black Diamond House of 2011, in Buffalo, a respectful but abstracted version of the pitched-roof houses that surround it. Sokol rotated the building’s ridgeline to allow a view of a former psychiatric hospital designed by H.H. Richardson, now a hotel. The city’s “amazing architectural pedigree,” Sokol says, also includes Sullivan, Wright, and the Saarinens, “and everyone there knows who these people are.” In locations ranging from Buffalo to Beijing and Los Angeles, where Sokol’s main office is, Adam Sokol Architecture Practice (asap) is designing buildings and interiors that combine an emphatically modern aesthetic with historical references and an emphasis on architecture’s narrative and experiential powers.

The Emperor Hotel Qianmen (2013) in Beijing, asap’s first project in China, takes its inspiration from the public bath that once occupied the site, using water as its theme, from the cantilevered rooftop pool to a glass atrium with a 49-foot “rainfall,” to an underground waterfall and pool. “I wanted people to experience water flowing through the interior,” Sokol says. In the more recent Park Hyatt X House, a 2,200-square-foot apartment in Beijing’s tallest residential tower, asap designed a business-entertaining space containing a sequence of eighteen domes, clad variously in materials like gold, glass mosaic, and velvet, and connected by arched openings. The apartment, Sokol says, “feels vast because it has so many spaces. I was excited about developing a typological language.”