LAN Architecture
Umberto Napolitano wanted to be a musician, and Benoit Jallon, a doctor. Years later they both turned to architecture, and are now into their seventh year as co-principals of Paris-based, 20-person firm LAN Architecture.

Photo courtesy LAN Architecture

Future Cities Lab
Just off the heels of their Van Alen Institute New York Prize fellowship exhibit, The Aurora Project, Nataly Gattegno and Jason Johnson, principals of Future Cities Lab, are putting their lives back together after nearly three years on the road.

Photo © Future Cities Lab

Studio Urnod: Urban nomads refine their craft in New York City
Thirty somethings Koray Duman and Laith Sayigh may have found similarities in their Middle Eastern roots, but both say it’s their belief that big ideas can come from a small, focused practice that really keeps their New York City based firm Studio Urnod (the name comes from a merging of urban and nomad) busy.

Photo courtesy Studio Urnod

MEx: A Design Cooperative Grows in Brooklyn
Welcome to Metropolitan Exchange (MEx) in New York City, “an architecture, urban planning, and research cooperative” where members “collaborate on architecture and planning projects, pursue development opportunities, and sponsor lectures, film screenings, and exhibitions.”

Photo courtesy Al Atarra

Burton Baldridge Architects: No detail is too small
What is an architect to do when he wants complete control over the construction and details of every project he designs? Start his own construction company, of course! At least, that was the answer for Burton Baldridge, principal of three-year-old, Austin, Texas, design firm Burton Baldridge Architects and construction firm BBA-DB.

Photo courtesy Burton Baldridge Architects

Nous Gallery promotes design and more: Founder Melissa Woolford sleeplessly inspires
Meet designer Melissa Woolford. After earning her M.Arch. with honors from the Pratt Institute in New York in 2006, Woolford moved to London to work for Zaha Hadid. In 2007, she teamed up with Paul Coates, architecture educator since 1970, and Christian Derix, founder of Aedas Architects, and founded Nous Gallery.

Photo © Tom Birkett

Tacklebox: Finding the tools to create enticing environs for the art and design world, and then some
Growing up in Roanoke, Virginia, Jeremy Barbour says architecture was never on his radar. Now the principal of three-year-old New York City—based firm Tacklebox, as well as a teacher at Columbia’s School of Architecture (where he received his master’s) and Parsons The New School For Design, he lives and breathes it.

Photo courtesy Tacklebox

M1/dtw: Mixing architecture and graphics
Detroit-based architectural designer Christian Unverzagt was doing interdisciplinary work before he knew the phrase. As a skateboarding teenager in the ’80s, he says, “We had to create our own landscape, so I would design and build all these backyard ramps. And I would design all the flyers to raise money for them. I was producing a brand.”

Photo courtesy M1/dtw

Wilk Salinas: Filling Berlin’s lost spaces with realized vision
“Stupid projects.” The phrase comes up repeatedly in conversation with German-born Gil Wilk and Spaniard Ana Salinas, whose eponymous studio is based in Berlin. “It is something that is fun for us,” Wilk explains, but he adds, “These are projects that everyone says will not work.”

Photo courtesy Wilk Salinas

Lukas Petrash’s MCD House: Trash becomes a family’s treasure
To describe the house Lukas Petrash designed and built in Huntsville, Texas, requires a certain breathless tone. MCD House cost only $24,500 to build. It measures only 484 square feet. And Petrash was only 23 years old when he finished it.

Photo courtesy Lukas Petrash

Gage / Clemenceau Architects: Making their Mark(c)s
While many emerging architects feel they wear their hearts on their sleeves, Mark Foster Gage and Marc Clemenceau Bailly display theirs in Times Square. Commissioned to design a Valentine to the famous intersection, Gage and Clemenceau created an intricate, 12-foot tall stainless steel and luminescent Corian heart.

Photo courtesy Gage / Clemenceau

Changes at NCARB: The Six-Month Rule and other news
Are you ready for the changes at NCARB? Harry M. Falconer, AIA, director of the agency's Intern Development Program, discusses the Six-Month Rule and other new developments.

Photo courtesy NCARB

Pb Elemental: A portfolio full of built work and no boundaries
At 32 and 30 years old, Seattle-based Pb Elemental's founders skipped the typical young firm's rights of passage, and now have dozens of projects built around Seattle and several under construction around the world.

Photo courtesy Pb Elemental

studiomake: Careful craft, from objects to architecture
Recent Cranbrook graduates David and Im Schafer are bound for Bangkok this summer, where they will launch their firm studiomake full-time. Both say their crafts education will influence architectural output.

Photo courtesy studiomake

Raising Architectural Spectres
RECORD’s Suzanne Stephens visits the unusually named Ghost International Architectural Laboratory. The design-build workshop in Nova Scotia celebrated its tenth session in 2008.

Photo © Greg Richardson

Rodriguez Studio: Designing the lines, then coloring within them
Carlos Rodriguez went from studying architecture to accounting before coming back to architecture with a vengeance. Now the principal of New York City based Rodriguez Studio, he puts all his training to good use.

Photo courtesy Rodriguez Studio

UW landscape architecture students take on public works
The University of Washington’s landscape architecture students are putting their studies into practice with a number of non-profit projects as a part of its design build program.

Photo courtesy University of Washington

SPINE Architects: An architectural backbone in a challenging land
It’s probably safe to say that most architects get into the business of architecture because of a creative urge, not because of the money. Amelie Chai and Stephen Zawmoe Shwe, principals of SPINE Architects, took that reasoning to another level when they moved to Shwe’s home country of Myanmar and began their firm in 2003. “We’re not here to make money,” says Chai. "We’re here to build a lot."

Photo courtesy SPINE Architects

Laid off? How emerging design professionals are coping
Although this situation can’t be sugar-coated, these six emerging professionals prove that a temporary setback can become an opportunity to reevaluate life, and career path, and to accomplish goals not possible while working full time.

Images courtesy Scott Gustafson, Brian Jones and Karl-Erik Larson

Maggie Peng Studio: Flexible, and in fashion
Maggie Peng says that her old employers, LOT-EK, influenced her work because, as she puts it, "the office is interested in designing for flexibility. Whether it's using modular systems or preexisting units, it's about tapping into the built-in intelligence of preexisting products. And that is very much something I still work with."

Photo courtesy Maggie Peng Studio

Grand House Cooperative: University of Waterloo, Ontario, students built and live in it
The brainchild of Chantal Cornu, who holds an M.Arch. degree from the University of Waterloo, the $1.1 million (Canadian) Grand House Cooperative in Cambridge, Ontario was the perfect opportunity to connect people in the building trades, and give students an inspired place to live.

Photo courtesy University of Waterloo

Hierve Diseñeria: Boiled Over by Design
Alejandro Villarreal named his Mexico City firm Hierve, the Spanish word for "boiling.” It was an apropos decision for a firm that brings an ebullient mix of social responsibility, functionality, and spirituality to its projects.

Photo courtesy Hierve Diseñeria

Wesleyan University’s SplitFrame: Architecture Research Design Build
Learn about a wildlife sanctuary created by Wesleyan University's year-old design/build studio.

Photo courtesy Wesleyan University

AEDS: Life in plastic, it’s fantastic
Lebanese-born architect Ammar Eloueini established Ammar Eloueini Digit-All Studio (AEDS) in Paris in 1997. Although the Museum of Modern Art owns Eloueini’s work and the New York Architectural League, AIA Chicago, and the French Ministry of Culture have showered him with accolades, this forward thinker admits it is taking time to fully realize his talents.

Photo courtesy AEDS

FPmod: Where the wild things are made
Florencia Pita thinks cities should have more sleeping monsters. At least one, maybe two, just a few at the most. “We haven’t been able to move past Modernism,” says the architect, professor, and principal of three-person Los Angeles–based architecture firm FPmod, which she founded in 2006.

Photo courtesy FPmod

Scalar Architecture: Urban scale, small world
Julio Salcedo, principal of architecture firm Scalar Architecture, is taking back the word generic.  He uses the word freely, and to him, especially when coupled with the term generative, it doesn't mean bland and personalityfree.

Photo courtesy Scalar Architecture

Free Green: Giving it away
Two years ago, archrecord2 profiled Ben Uyeda as his team from Cornell competed in the Solar Decathlon. Following the competition, team members formed Zero Energy Design (Independence Energy Homes), a collaborative effort among architects, engineers, and financial experts to design green residential architecture.

Photo courtesy Free Green

Houser Walker Architecture: Half a glass, full plate
Whatever Gregory Walker, AIA, and Hank Houser, AIA, bring to the mix that makes up their seven-person firm, it's working, and despite equivalent shares of optimism and pessimism, they're both equally surprised at their success.

Photo courtesy Houser Walker Architecture

Wikitecture: From clicks to bricks, avatars to architects
It takes a village to conceive architecture. Just consider Studio Wikitecture, which won Architecture for Humanity's Founders Award in the 2007 AMD Open Architecture Challenge.

Photo courtesy Wikitecture

PRA: Young power players in China
Meet Philippe Rondeau, a Frenchman who has joined up with a Chinese partner, Li Yun, to make his mark on the Eastern skyline.

Photo courtesy PRA

USC’s American Academy in China takes it East
Last year, well-known Chinese architect Qingyun Ma, founder of Shanghai firm MADA s.p.a.m., moved to Los Angeles to become dean of the USC School of Architecture. Now he’s bringing USC back to China.

Photo courtesy USC

Spirit of Space: Elusive design caught on video
Two Chicago-based architecture graduates whose firm, Spirit of Space, translates architectural space into film.

Image courtesy Spirit of Space

Redtop Architects: Three Heads Are Better
When the three founders of Redtop Architects, met while working for a New York firm, they found that they had a lot more in common than red hair. "We had a mutual admiration for each other," says Shakespeare, "as well as a similar aesthetic and goals."

Image courtesy Redtop Architects

Van Alen Institute Fellowship Program
Last year, the Van Alen Institute introduced a fellowship program, meant to support emerging architectural practitioners and scholars. As a result, the institute has become an architectural alchemist, putting together wide-ranging research interests to get at the notion of public architecture.

Image courtesy Van Alen Institute

Electric Dreams: Wake up!
The phrase "Swedish design" calls up images of spare spaces laid by careful masons or rendered from local woods. Not mini-spectacles, such as the ceiling of Pleasant Bar in Stockholm, which is covered in convex security mirrors. "We often get that comment, that we're not what one expects from a Swedish design studio," says Joel Degermark, one half of Electric Dreams.

Image courtesy Electric Dreams

B+U: Envisioning a city of sound
Talk about frozen music. Herwig Baumgartner and Scott Uriu, partners in the nine-year-old, Los Angeles-based architecture firm B+U, have found a way to turn actual sound into buildings.

Image courtesy B+U

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.

Image 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.

Image 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.

Image 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.

Image 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.”

Image 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.

Image 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.

Image 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.

Image 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.

Image 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.

Image 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.

Image courtesy Spirit of Place