At a time when formalism might be considered a dirty word in architecture, Miroslava Brooks and Daniel Markiewicz contumaciously named their practice Forma. “This work is about rectangles,” says Markiewicz, “and about exploring their spatial and material efficiencies.” Despite their characterization of the work as hard-nosed formal exploration, the projects are often colorful, tactile, and, at times, exuberant. “There’s a balance between rigor, structure, and a kind of playfulness or permissiveness,” admits Brooks. In other words, the architects aren’t squares—they just like to play with them.

In November 2018, the duo founded their practice in New York City, where they briefly had an office before the pandemic forced remote work. Brooks and her family relocated to Los Angeles so she could teach at UCLA, while Markiewicz and his moved to Phila­delphia. But the two have continued their collaboration, now fully remote and bicoastal.

Brooks, 42, was born in Slovakia and came to the United States to attend the Ohio State University. Markiewicz, also 42, is a native New Yorker who went to Princeton to study civil engineering. They met while pursuing their master’s degrees at the Yale School of Architecture. After graduating, Brooks taught with Peter Eisenman at Yale while working in his New York office on the Yeni­kapı Archaeological Museum in Istanbul. Markiewicz was an associate at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, where he worked on high-profile institutional projects, most notably the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art. Both ended up teaching at UPenn, which is when they began collaborating (unsuccessfully) on competition entries.

As the duo worked on those competitions and other self-initiated projects, themes began to emerge. “We’ve been teaching full-time from the beginning,” says Brooks, “which allowed us early on, when we didn’t have clients, to keep pushing the office and to think about what kinds of projects we want to do.” They discovered that their preferred working method—unapologetically accepting the Corbusian dictum that “the plan is the generator”—is to develop meticulously detailed ichnography. “It’s almost an unspoken goal,” says Markiewicz, who also teaches visualization classes at UPenn. “We want the drawing to be like a piece of art.”

Starting with rectangles—aggregating, deforming, and transforming them—Forma experiments with typologies categorized as either “homes” or “commons.” In residential projects like the speculative Fire Island House and Miami House as well as the self-developed House on a Hill, which completed construction last year, living spaces are elevated on a piano nobile while geometric ordering suggests clear domestic utility. In public projects, such as the unbuilt Playscapes community center, a simple bar is manipulated by program elements and by the ground, which is conceived as an active force shaping the building. For the 2025 Chicago Arch­itecture Biennial, Forma explored how these ideas transform to the small scale by reimagining the plan of Playscapes as a rug with the building as cushions.

In a little more than seven years, this two-person office has already produced an impressive body of work. Maybe that’s because—just like their indifference to today’s taboo against formalism—Brooks and Markiewicz don’t seem to suffer any “anxiety of influence” or “paralysis by analysis.” They simply have fun doggedly pursuing what interests them.