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About the Studio
Who We Are
Design to encourage collaboration, innovation, and community.
Mission & Values
Our mission is built on the potential of existing places. The best way to improve the economic, social, and environmental needs of residents is to revitalize and regenerate what’s there. Build it up. Don’t tear it down. We’ve approached this mission through adaptive reuse and urban infill, a focus on corridor and neighborhood revitalization, and district vision plans.We believe design can improve urban life and foster more vibrant, resilient, sustainable, and equitable cities.
What We Do
Instead, we devise discrete acts that, like raindrops on a desert, restore life to each project’s context. No matter the size, we view every project as a chance to nourish the streets it inhabits and in turn sustain it. Architecture + Urban Life Project Types include:
The core of our practice is the repair of existing cities and the return of flourishing neighborhoods. No single form or use guides our work.
Services
How We Work
While we examine each project individually, without preconceived notions, we rely on the following shared values to inform our decisions: Work against type, dismantling formulaic solutions, instead questioning our own assumptions, exploring the out-of-bounds. Embrace quirkiness, grit, and informality in making “real” and joyful places. Reinvigorate cities incrementally, using step-by-step plans enacted over time to create multiple forms, uses, and scales. Foresee long-term outcomes and understand city-making as a sustained endeavor. Put human beings at the center of each design. Let people define their own experiences and allow their voices to speak for themselves, no matter how large or small the project. Less can be more, and working with structures at hand and restrained budgets can lead to innovation, increased affordability, more local and interesting tenant mixes, and sustainability. Tread lightly to address the challenges of livability in dense environments, integrating economics and practicality with inspiration, beauty, uniqueness, and an expression of place.We make positive change in cities by being agile and teaming up with those our work directly affects.
Our Workplace
Our 34,000-square-foot WELL Gold studio was designed to mimic the cities we hope to create: messy, unorthodox, non-hierarchical, open-minded, cooperative. Everyone is seated in custom-designed workstations in an open environment. A mezzanine wraps the perimeter of the space, creating a “bridgewalk” overlook with lounges, workspaces and breakout rooms. The loading dock has been converted into a private patio with a firepit and an edible green wall. Our kitchen, which faces a public promenade, becomes part of the civic landscape.
Our studio is located in the urban core of downtown Long Beach. With a mission of creating more vibrant, sustainable, and equitable communities, in 2017 we relocated from an office tower to an empty storefront on an overlooked block, with the aim of putting our commitments right onto the street.
Who We Are
We are passionate about what we do and how we work together. As an integrated practice, our talented and spirited team of city-makers strives to be successful in the workplace and beyond.