Douglas Burnham wants to quietly rewire your experiences. He cites perception-teasing installations by artists such as James Turrell, Robert Smithson, and Michael Heizer as major influences, and early in his career he created similarly destabilizing work with San Francisco Bay Area design provocateurs the Interim Office of Architecture (IOOA). 'It was a little bit like a drug experience, where the normative frame just sort of disappears,' he says of IOOA's installation work in the 1990s. With his own firm, Envelope Architecture + Design, he creates simple geometries with restrained finishes, but uses an odd move or surprising material to coax those who encounter the work away from standard methods of reading or even perceiving architecture: 'When we're working on projects, there is a kind of scraping clean of things'we try to strip away barriers between people and their experiences.'

The Wisconsin native landed at IOOA a few years after earning a B.Arch. at Cornell University and then working for another small San Francisco firm. He stuck around at IOOA for about six years until, he says, 'the firm started to fall apart.' During its protracted breakup, Burnham took on the role of project architect on a house in Sonoma, California. That experience helped him land his first commission, another residential project, after he left the practice. Officially founded in 2002, his now 10-person firm has designed everything from restaurants to offices to urban interventions.