Category: Studio Notes

The Case for the Small Studio

People assume that a studio stays small because it has not yet succeeded at getting large. Every so often someone asks, kindly, when we plan to “grow” — as though the current arrangement were a chrysalis. I have thought about this question for a long time, and my answer has settled into something firmer than modesty. Staying small is not what happened to us. It is what we chose.

The trade you are actually making

Size buys capacity. A large firm can pursue many commissions at once, absorb a bad year, and put a dozen specialists on a single problem. Those are not small advantages, and I do not pretend otherwise.

But size also buys distance. As a practice grows, the person whose judgment the client hired spends less and less time actually exercising that judgment. The work is delegated down through a structure, and the original sensibility thins with each hand it passes through. What you gain in reach you tend to lose in control — not control over people, but control over the thousand small decisions that are the difference between a competent building and a considered one.

I would rather do fewer things and still recognize my own hand in all of them.

Small does not mean isolated

The misunderstanding I most want to correct is that a small studio is a limited one. In practice it is the opposite. Because we are not carrying a large permanent staff, we are free to assemble exactly the right people for each project and no one we do not need.

For a museum we might work with a lighting designer we trust and a local architect who knows the ground. For a school in another region, an entirely different constellation — a structural engineer with a feel for local materials, an artisan whose craft becomes the building’s signature, sometimes an academic whose research shapes the whole approach. These are not subcontractors filling gaps in an org chart. They are chosen collaborators, and the studio is really the relationships more than the room.

  • We can work across countries because we are light enough to move.
  • We can work across disciplines because we are not defending in-house departments that need to be kept busy.
  • We can say no, which is the most underrated freedom in practice.

Trust is easier to keep than to scale

A client who hires a small studio is hiring specific people, and they know it. That clarity is worth a great deal. There is no anxiety about being handed off to a junior team after the pitch, no wondering whose work they are actually getting. The person who made the promise is the person in the room when it is kept.

Continuity is the quiet luxury of a lean team. The same few minds hold the whole arc of a project, from the first uncertain sketch to the last detail on site. Nothing important has to be re-explained, because nothing important was ever delegated away. When something goes wrong — and on every real project something does — the client is talking to someone who has carried the design from the beginning and has the standing to fix it.

When it might make sense to grow

I am not dogmatic. There are reasons a studio should add people: a body of work that consistently demands a skill you keep renting, a collaborator so essential that they belong inside rather than beside the practice, or simply the wish to give talented younger architects a place to build a career.

But growth should answer a question the work is actually asking, not a question about status or scale. The moment you add people to look more like a firm rather than to make better buildings, you have started trading away the very thing that made the studio worth keeping small. So far, the work has not asked. Until it does, I am content to stay exactly this size — and to consider it a form of ambition rather than a lack of one.

Designing for Institutions on Three Continents

An institution is a client with a memory. Unlike a family, which arrives with a life to be housed, an institution arrives with a history to be honored and a future it wants you to help imagine. That is true of a museum in one country and a school in another. What changes — sometimes beyond recognition — is everything around that shared fact.

I have spent much of my working life moving between these commissions, and if I have learned anything, it is that the brief you are handed is never the brief you must actually solve.

The brief changes when the culture changes

A cultural mission asked me once to design “welcoming but dignified” reception rooms. Those two words meant something entirely different than they would have meant to a client a few hundred kilometers away. In one tradition, welcome is expressed through openness — sightlines, glass, the visible activity of a working institution. In another, dignity requires a sequence of thresholds, a sense that arrival is earned through passage. Same adjectives, opposite plans.

This is the first humbling lesson of international practice: the words in a brief are not universal. “Modern,” “traditional,” “open,” “private,” and “grand” are all local dialects. Before I draw anything, I try to learn what those words mean here — not what they mean in the design magazines.

Balancing the institution’s identity with local custom

Every institution wants to look like itself. A museum has a collection and a philosophy; an embassy carries a nation’s image; a school embodies a theory of how children learn. Your job is to express that identity — but you are building it inside a place with its own deeply held ideas about what a serious building is.

The tension is real and it cannot be waved away. A design language that reads as confident and contemporary in one capital can read as cold or even disrespectful in another. I have learned to treat local building custom not as an obstacle to the client’s identity but as the grammar in which that identity must be spoken. The institution supplies the sentence; the region supplies the language. Fluency, not translation, is the goal.

Logistics, materials, and the honesty of craft

Then there is the matter of how things actually get built.

  • The material you specified may not exist within a thousand kilometers, and importing it may insult the local trades who could have made something better.
  • The craft tradition you find on site may be extraordinary at one thing and unfamiliar with another, and the design should lean into the former rather than fight it.
  • Timelines bend around seasons, holidays, and supply routes that no imported project schedule respects.

I have stopped seeing these as constraints to be managed and started seeing them as the design’s raw material. A building that is made of what a place knows how to make — and made well — carries an authority that no imported finish can buy. It looks like it belongs, because it does.

What holds true everywhere

For all these differences, a few things travel intact from one continent to the next.

Light behaves the same way in every language. People everywhere read scale with their bodies before they read it with their minds. A poorly proportioned room is uncomfortable in any culture, and a generous one is felt immediately, without translation. And every institution, no matter how grand its self-image, is ultimately used by individual people who need to find the door, the toilet, the exit, and a quiet place to sit. Serve them and you will not go far wrong.

If you are taking on your first international commission

Go early, and go to listen. Walk the streets around the site before you sketch. Ask local architects and builders what they are proud of and what frustrates them. Learn how the region’s best buildings handle their climate, because that knowledge is usually centuries old and will outperform anything you bring in a suitcase.

Most of all, resist the flattering idea that you have been hired to bring good design to a place that lacked it. You have been hired to bring your judgment into a conversation that was already underway long before you arrived. The architects who thrive across borders are not the ones with the strongest signature. They are the ones with the best ear.

What Choreography Taught Me About Floor Plans

Before I ever drew a plan, I watched people move. I spent a good part of my youth in rehearsal rooms, and though I never became a dancer of any consequence, the habit of watching how a body crosses a floor never left me. Years later, standing in an empty apartment in the Marais with a tape measure and a set of keys, I realized I was still doing the same thing — imagining the choreography of a life that had not yet arrived.

I have come to think that the most useful thing an architect can study is almost never architecture.

Why we should look outside our own discipline

There is a comfort in reading only the literature of one’s own field. It flatters us; it confirms what we already suspect. But a floor plan is not really a drawing of walls. It is a score for movement, a set of instructions for how a body will wake, wash, gather, retreat, and return. The disciplines that have thought hardest about movement are not the building trades. They are dance, theater, and cinema.

When I want to understand how a corridor should feel, I do not reach for a book on corridors. I think about a passage in a ballet where the stage empties and one figure is left to cross it alone. The corridor and the empty stage share a problem: how long should the crossing take, and what should the person feel while making it?

The parallels are more exact than they sound

Choreographers speak in terms that translate almost directly into plan.

There is composition — the arrangement of bodies in space so that the eye is led rather than confused. There is tempo — the deliberate control of how quickly one moves from one moment to the next. And there is the pause, the held breath before a phrase resolves, which in a building becomes a landing, a threshold, a widening of the hall where you are meant to slow down without being told to.

A few of the correspondences I return to most often:

  • A grand entrance is an entrance in the theatrical sense: it earns its drama by controlling what you cannot yet see.
  • A well-placed narrowing works like a musical rest — compression before release, so that the room beyond feels larger than its dimensions.
  • Circulation that doubles back on itself is not always a fault. Sometimes, as in dance, the return is the point.

Pacing a plan the way you pace a phrase

In residential work, this thinking is intimate. I ask how a person moves through a morning: the half-asleep walk to the kitchen, the more deliberate return in the evening. A good plan gives those two journeys different characters even when they trace the same path. The morning wants brevity and light; the evening wants to gather and slow.

Institutional work asks the same questions at a larger scale and for many bodies at once. A museum sequence is choreography for strangers — people who have never met, moving through the same rooms, whom you must guide without a single spoken instruction. You pace their attention: a compression at the entry, a long release into the first gallery, quieter alcoves where the crowd can thin and an individual can stand alone with one object. Get the rhythm wrong and the visitor feels harried or lost. Get it right and they never notice they were being led at all.

A plan that learned from a dance

I once worked on a house — I will keep it composite and unnamed, as I do with most of my client work — where the family kept describing their evenings as “chaotic.” Every drawing I made that solved the chaos with more walls felt wrong. Then I stopped thinking about walls and thought about the phrase: everyone arrives home within the same restless hour, and everyone wants a different thing from that hour.

So I designed the return the way I might stage an ensemble entrance. The threshold widened to absorb the first collision of coats and bags. From there the plan gently sorted its dancers — one path drifted toward the quiet of a study, another opened directly into the kitchen’s warmth, a third slipped upstairs unseen. Nothing was closed off. The bodies simply had room to find their own tempo. The chaos, it turned out, had never been a shortage of space. It was a shortage of sequence.

What you can take from this

You do not need a stage or a studio to use any of it. The next time a room in your own home feels wrong, resist the urge to reach for furniture first. Stand at the door and walk the path you actually take. Notice where you hurry, where you hesitate, where two people would collide. A plan, like a dance, is mostly about timing — about giving each movement the space and the moment it needs. Build for the crossing, not just the room, and the room tends to take care of itself.

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