Standard Architecture | Design

Our projects are guided by identity and culture, reflecting the narrative for which they’re designed.  Conscious of architecture’s potential to communicate, from a way of living to a company’s image, our work aspires to provide the setting that expresses the idea.

Settling in Los Angeles after living in Europe and traveling extensively, our experience gives us a distinct perspective on building and site.  It is a view that combines an elemental approach to architecture and an open relationship toward the environment.  As our practice evolves, this perspective increasingly defines our work. Our projects start with a dialogue about program and purpose, and progress toward their own identity.  At every scale, from furniture and interiors to architecture and urban planning, our architecture responds to fundamentals – space, light and materiality.  We design from the inside out, in response to a project’s specific conditions and constraints.  Views, light, proportion, orientation and materiality guide us to shape and organize volume.  Context and terrain; movement through space; and thresholds of variable permeability are consistent themes.

Collaboration and research across disciplines, and across time and culture, is essential to our work.  As the craft of building has become increasingly complex, participating in teams of diverse experts challenges us to find solutions that seamlessly integrate complexity.  This dialogue is supplemented by our own research.  We see history and the world as an illustrated guide to inventive design solutions that are ready for translation.  We find inspiration in everything from canonical architecture to indigenous dwellings and applied arts.

Working from Los Angeles, where landscape and site often permeate buildings, we believe that architecture can be landscape-generative rather than landscape displacing.  Our work, built and un-built, shows that architecture has the potential to coexist with the organic environment rather than consume it.  Beyond merely visual concepts, many of our proposals establish narratives for new ways of living, and illustrate the potential for a transformed experience.