We are a licensed architectural practice dedicated to finding simple approaches to complex problems. We believe in the power of design and that it should positively affect the way we perceive and experience our world. Design is at the trans-disciplinary intersection of social, economic, and environmental forces. As designers, we rely on the expertise of practitioners in allied fields to tackle complexity and find elegant, meaningful solutions.

A decentralized design practice is about knowledge dissemination.  Ideas formed in one location may find novel applicability elsewhere.  As a laboratory, we foster an ethos of cross-pollination, where stubborn issues may be approached by accessing the knowledge shared by another place or discipline.  We embrace our role as non-experts and look to allied fields and disparate locations for new angles.

Much of our work is based in Mass Timber systems.  We’re into it.  We’re into it for the same reason the industry and its allies are:

1.     Structural capabilities: Mass Timber greatly expands the possibilities for using wood in bigger, taller, and stronger structures.

2.     Speed of erection: Mass Timber capitalizes on off-site construction, modularity, and simple on-site techniques to limit on-site time.

3.     Carbon science:  Mass Timber can play a significant role in sequestering carbon and incentivizing the growth of productive forests.

We also think Mass Timber has potential that expands on stronger, faster, and greener.  It represents an opportunity to change the way we approach crafting the built environment.  To us, it is a vehicle to advance several critical agendas:

4.     Community empowerment: Forested regions across North America are sites of resource richness and social poverty. Helping communities engage with their resource environments upends this model to create a more equitable, higher quality rural architecture.

5.     Energy in architecture: Implementing Mass Timber systems can create an evolved understanding of thermodynamics in architecture, fostering a multi-scalar approach to thermal performance, from the physiological effects of cellular solids to the climatic effects of productive forestry.

6.     Non-expert practice: Mass Timber requires collaboration across disciplines, from foresters and architects to manufacturers and developers. Embracing a non-expert practitioner role permits a renewed, trans-disciplinary approach to building.  Allied fields, formerly siloed, converge and learn how to build better.