Grzywinski Pons Architects takes Manhattan
Challenged with the constraints of working within New York City, including laying the foundations for a hotel just 29 inches above a subway line, Grzywinski Pons Architects have defined their design approach based on their location.

Photo courtesy Grzywinski Pons Architects

SCI-Arc’s CHUB table
It's not often—or ever—that a boardroom table causes a sensation. At least not until architects Ramiro Diaz-Granados and Heather Flood created the CHUB table, one of the most original pieces of furniture ever for the board of directors of the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Photo courtesy SCI-Arc

Bauenstudio: Exploring container and contained
Some young architects feel it's time to start their solo practices when they have a client. Others wait until they win a competition. For Marc Roehrle and Mo Zell, both happy circumstances came to pass, one after the other, and, in 2006, Boston-based Bauenstudio was born.

Photo courtesy Bauenstudio

DesignBuildBLUFF: Drawing on two-by-fours
In 2000, University of Utah architecture professor Hank Louis started DesignBuildBLUFF, a lab that gives students the opportunity to create functional and beautiful houses on the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation.

Photo courtesy DesignBuildBLUFF

Architecture in Formation: Dream projects, all real
When architect Matthew Bremer, AIA, isn’t busy designing cool projects like a VIP lounge in New York’s JFK Airport, a showroom for an upscale purveyor of Brazilian design, Manhattan apartments, or the redevelopment of a 103,000-square-foot former prison site in Brooklyn, New York, he’s working on his dream project—developing his family’s ranch land in Bulverde, Texas, into a walkable, modern, mixed-use community. “It doesn’t matter where you are,” says Bremer, “the Texas creeps back into your blood.”

Photo courtesy Architecture in Formation

Situ Studio: Finding connections without limits
Situ Studio is a self-described “research, design, and fabrication firm,” and its five partners, who met while studying architecture at Cooper Union in New York City, emphasize the variety of their work. This approach allows the firm to work on diverse projects, such as analyzing the topography of a crater in India while fabricating a lobby installation for Kohn Pedersen Fox.

Photo courtesy Situ Studio

Techentin Buckingham Architecture: Keeping it real-world
Techentin Buckingham will pass on paper architecture. The Los Angeles studio, founded by college friends Warren Techentin, AIA, and Henry Buckingham, AIA, has focused its six years so precisely on real-world building that the partners only recently decided to enter one competition annually—if only to keep staff spirits high and creative juices flowing.

Photo courtesy Techentin Buckingham Architecture

LeanArch: Adding whimsy to sophisticated design
He doesn’t wear a cape, but architect James Meyer, AIA, principal of Los Angeles firm LeanArch, has a superhero thing going on nonetheless. Having started his solo practice in 2000 with small projects like bathroom remodels and room additions, Meyer says he began his fledgling firm with a passionate concept.

Photo courtesy LeanArch

Teaming with larger firms serves opportunities
Eight-and-a-half days is barely enough time for most people to get over jet lag when traveling, but for a group of nine students from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., it's a period of intense work in far-flung locations such as Nepal, Machu Pichu, or Ireland.

Photo courtesy DDA

The Galante Architecture Studio
When you come from a family of builders, what choice is there but to be an architect? For Theodore Galante, AIA, his family members' capacity to make things both inspired and contributed to what he calls a "mystic assumption" that he'd follow that route.

Photo courtesy The Galante Architecture Studio

Spirit of Place: Students go global
Eight-and-a-half days is barely enough time for most people to get over jet lag when traveling, but for a group of nine students from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., it's a period of intense work in far-flung locations such as Nepal, Machu Pichu, or Ireland.

Photo courtesy Spirit of Place

KRDB: The art of the deal
How does a guy with a degree in finance from Michigan State University end up as principal of an architecture firm in Austin, Texas? “Currency arbitrage just wasn’t giving me a creative outlet,” laughs Chris Krager, principal of Austin-based KRDB. “I did the banking thing for four years. That was enough.” Krager moved to Austin to seek a degree in architecture. “I wanted to build, and the University of Texas had a good balance of theory and practice.”

Images: Courtesy KRDB

Tom Allisma: Developing a taste
Omaha is better known as the heart of corn country than as a hotbed of architectural design, but it has proved fertile ground for one young designer. Tom Allisma, Assoc. AIA, balances teaching interior design; acting as principal of his design firm, Tom Allisma Productions; developing concepts; and designing restaurants and bars, which he and his business partners also finance.

Images: Courtesy Tom Allisma Productions

David Yum Architects: Appreciating complexities
When architect David Yum started his own practice, David Yum Architects, in New York City, in 2000, he was eager, enthusiastic, and confident that success would be imminent.

Images: Courtesy David Yum Architects

Mapping Venice: Students take on the city of water
One of the biggest frustrations of architectural-history professors is that the material they teach and the students to whom they’re teaching it are often separated by thousands of miles. Ask any of them what they’d do for their students with a million bucks, and most would say, charter a private jet and let their students visit and experience first-hand the great monuments of the world.

Images: Courtesy of Columbia University

Oyler Wu Collaborative: Layers and texture
Their resume reads like an architect’s fairy tale: two aspiring architects, Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, met at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, graduated, and moved to New York to hone their craft working with prestigious architects and firms—he for Toshiko Mori and Lebbeus Woods, she for Architecture Research Office and Gluckman Mayner Architects.

Images: Courtesy Oyler Wu Collaborative

Associated Fabrication: Heavy metal/light touch
The four partners of Associated Fabrication operate a design firm under the name 4-pli, and mobilize Associated's services within different projects.

images: Courtesy Associated Fabrication

Beckmann N’Thépé:
Despite the obstacles, Françoise N'Thépé and Aldric Beckmann, founders of Paris-based firm Beckmann-N'Thépé, started in 2002, has already been able to amass one of the most impressive collections of new work in Paris.

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Images: Courtesy Beckmann N’Thépé

Mountain Pine Beetles: epidemic or opportunity?
Vancouver-based intern architects Abdel Munem Amin and David Yi-Jen Tseng created the only architectural response to the competition—a modular stair titled Six Steps: Blue Modular. In line with the competition’s call for mass-market applications, the stair can be reconfigured to accommodate any orientation or distance between floors.

Images: Courtesy Abdel Munem Amin and David Yi-Jen Tseng

Studio ST: From inside to the ground up
When Israeli architect Esther Sperber left Pei Partnership Architects to strike out on her own with Studio ST in 2003, she was excited, nervous, and up to the challenge. “Having the opportunity to work so closely with Mr. Pei was amazing,” she says.

URBANbuild students bring hope to New Orleans
Even before Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, housing in the city was a problem. Tulane University’s School of Architecture, under an umbrella program of the school called Tulane City Center, had been working to help since the summer of 2005, with a design-build studio called URBANbuild.

Photo: Courtesy of URBANbuild

De Leon + Primmer Architecture
A flurry of recent commissions validated the decision of De Leon + Primmer Architecture’s principals to return to Louisville, Kentucky after relocating to Charlotte, North Carolina.

Mafoombey explores the acoustics of cardboard
Martti Kalliala and Esa Ruskeepää were college roommates while attending the architecture school at Helsinki University of Technology. The two students began to experiment with cut corrugated cardboard when they entered the open-to-all Habitare design contest at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki in 2005. The competition asked for a small space for listening to and experiencing music within the set dimensions of 2.5 cubic meters. Thus was born Mafoombey, a space for music.

Making it with metal
For New York City firm Caliper Studio, it’s the making that gives them passion, as they combine design services with metal fabrication.

Photo: Courtesy of Caliper studio

Great Schools by Design hits the spot
In Work, it’s discussion about school design that caused the American Architectural Foundation and Target to team up and get students involved.

Photo: Courtesy of ACE and OWP/P

An optimistic approach
David Montalba, AIA, has done a lot and gained a lot of mentors in his scant 35 years on the planet. As well as working for several prominent Los Angeles–based architecture firms—Gehry Partners, Pugh+Scarpa, Daly Genik, among others—Montalba has succeeded in making a name for his three-year-old firm, Montalba Architects, in a region that is, well, lousy with quality architects.

An architect uses her design training to bring awareness to a crisis
Leslie Thomas, partner with the Chicago-based firms Larc Inc. and Larc Studio, wasn’t one to jump on causes and preach about them. However, when the architect, mother, and Emmy-winning art director (for art direction of the 1999 HBO movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge) saw a photo of a victimized child in a March 2006 New York Times article about the genocide in Darfur, she was changed.