Firm name: No Architecture
Location: New York
Year founded: 2014
Firm leadership: Andrew Philip Kwai-Hoon Heid
Firm size: Five
Education: M.Arch., Princeton University; B.A., Yale University

Firm mission: We’re dedicated to the harmony of nature, ecology, and urbanism through innovative architecture. Our goal is to break down the barriers between design, development, and sustainability.

First commission: Courtyard House. It interrogates the “glass house” typology through a dynamic relationship to the native landscape. Burrowing the house into the existing topography created visual and acoustic privacy from the neighbors while increasing thermal insulation.

Defining project and why: The Flower House advances the spatial propositions we began at the Courtyard House, and reinterprets the “glass house” typology into a ring concept comprising six interconnected, petal-like pavilions. Similarly excavated into a hillside, the project’s topography not only offers thermal insulation but also modulates interior atmospheres along spectrums of open to closed, public to private, as well as above and below grade. The project questions notions of transparency not only through its materiality but also from a social dimension. The program flows in a matrix plan that provides multiple flexible configurations of communal and private spaces. Elaborating transparency and landscape as twin strategies for connecting the different programs, the Flower House amplifies the poetic relationship to near and distant landscapes while sponsoring social interaction.

Biggest challenge facing architects today: How to address the climate crisis while still engaging the intractable problems of the discipline, the fundamental elements of architecture: the façade, the envelope, the structure, the column, the wall, the plan. One way of approaching this challenge is to learn from the Indigenous people and the vernacular, from sustainable settlements predating the Industrial Revolution. To look back at the Hutongs in Beijing, the Medinas in North Africa, etc. That is something we have researched and exhibited at the Shenzhen Architecture Biennale and over the past several years: the science behind the passive cooling, the natural ventilation, and so on. It’s not just about energetic propositions but also about formal and spiritual propositions.

On the bookshelf: With my graduate architecture students at Pratt, we’re reading the preface to The Master Builders by Peter Blake (W. W. Norton & Company | Knopf, 1960), “Figures, Doors and Passages” by Robin Evans (1978), “The Universal Patent Office” in Content by Rem Koolhaas/OMA (Taschen, 2004), and A-typical Plan by Jeannette Kuo (Park Books, 2013). Outside of class, I’ve started reading Ilya Prigogine’s and Isabelle Stengers’ Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (Bantam New Age Books, 1984).