Design Vanguard

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Based in Tokyo but born in a rural town on the island of Shikoku, Hironaka Ogawa still draws inspiration from the countryside.

Jorge Gracia, the 39-year-old founder of Gracia Studio, has quickly built a reputation for distinctive Modernist architecture in his hometown of Tijuana, Mexico.

A husband-and-wife team has gone back to basics, studying the material and structural innovations of centuries past to create new systems for building. Lonn Combs and Rona Easton, married in life as well as in practice, have spent the last year living and working in Rome. Combs won a Rome Prize in Architecture in 2011 and, with Easton, has been studying Italian architect and engineer Pier Luigi Nervi’s groundbreaking innovations with concrete. In a way, their time in Rome has been a mirror of their practice in recent years. Just as they are taking the time now to “slow down

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).

Brothers Dominic Leong and Chris Leong became architects for the only reason that matters: They couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Glasgow’s industrial heritage and roll-up-your-sleeves building traditions informed the work of Robin Lee and Alan Pert when they launched their firm NORD (Northern Office for Research & Design) in 2002.

"One thing that describes our firm is that we're caught between generations,” says Lisa Iwamoto.

Sebastian Schmaling and Brian Johnsen describe their studio’s work as being “informed by a reading of site and terrain.