"office statement"

 

 

If given the choice between staring blankly into space or reading architect's office statements on their website, we choose the first. They all say the same thing: we are sustainable, responsible with budgets, experienced, award-winning, etc.... The game seems to be how to say nothing particular and comfort any worries of someone contemplating hiring you. After a few clicks, it's hard not to think that all this quote-unquote professionalism is very cold at its core.

 

We can't tell you exactly when D--D--D started. We would like to say it was 2015-2016, but we did not have office space then and we don't even have a name. So, eventually, we drifted toward D--D--D, an acronym of our names and reflection of a shared desire to be horizontal and fuzzy, as opposed to tall and shiny. We began around a regular table, a surface for collecting, gathering, and working through a range of design experiments - a make-believe of architectural fantasies, problems, and thoughts. No matter how much we have grown, we would still remain around a large table, working together on each project through playful experimentation and serious research. 

 

We chose Shanghai is purposeful. With Shanghai considered a new global frontier, We enjoy the center of this contemporary chaos. The city’s cultural, urban, and historic contexts function as a point of departure for the architectural explorations involved in every project. Because new sets of contemporary problems relating to buildings now extend beyond traditional architecture, the practical challenges traditional boundaries of architecture to include other complementary disciplines.