Firm principals: Nathan Rich, AIA, Miriam Peterson, Assoc. AIA
Location: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Year founded: 2012
Firm size: Seven
Firm's personality: Passionate and precise, but kind
Education: Peterson: M.Arch. from the Yale University School of Architecture, B.A. from Cornell University; Rich: M.Arch. from Yale, B.A. from Wesleyan University
Experience: Peterson: Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Gans Studio in New York; Rich: Steven Holl Architects and SHoP Architects in New York; Woods Bagot in New York and London
Firm mission: We create ambitious projects of lasting social and cultural value. We have our aesthetic obsessions, but we also embrace collaboration inside and outside the studio as an essential part of the design process. This makes us smarter about the future and helps us better serve a diverse range of clients and communities.
One thing everyone should know about your studio: We love making models
Special item in your studio space: Our rock collection. Each piece is uncut, unpolished, and collected in its naturally formed state. They are laid out in our office according to the color spectrum.
The most important piece of criticism you ever received: A quote from former U.S. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn (D-Texas): “Any jackass can kick down a barn but it takes a carpenter to build one.”
First commission: A painting studio on the Connecticut River. The site was in a flood plain and part of an historic village, so there were significant constraints—a rich and challenging way to start the practice.
Defining project and why: Galerie Perrotin, a 25,000-square-foot adaptive reuse of a historic building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side into a complex for contemporary art. The project spans five floors in the Beckenstein Building on Orchard Street, and includes offices, a bookstore, residences, art storage, and exhibition spaces. Prior to starting our office, we did primarily institutional work. This project represented a shift back towards more public buildings.
The strategies we developed during the design process for Perrotin have influenced everything we have done since, especially the integration of lighting, structure, and mechanical systems; indirect lighting techniques; and adaptive reuse more broadly.
Another important project and why: We are currently working with an ambitious arts organization in Detroit on the adaptive reuse of a former Catholic church into a multiuse arts complex that will include spaces for exhibition, performance, and research, as well as residential and hospitality programming. The project is in a neighborhood that has been hollowed out after decades of attrition. The local community is supportive and the potential for long term impact on the neighborhood is enormous. Detroit is an amazing place to be working: There are opportunities for design to have immediate impact on the scale of entire neighborhoods.
Most successful collaboration: Our current project with the Rubin Museum is highly collaborative. We are redesigning the third floor of the museum into a project the curatorial team is calling "The Mandala Lab." It will be a space for a temporal and collective experience—a contrast to the rest of the museum, which is dedicated to exhibiting a permanent collection of Himalayan art and artifacts. The curators have pulled together an uncanny group of creatives for us to work with, including a scent designer, a neuroscientist, an aquarium designer, several artists, and a Himalayan gong maker. The project will be complete later this year.
Ambitions in the next five years: To keep building our team. We want an office that reflects the complexity of practice. This would mean hiring thinkers, experts, and creators from outside traditional design disciplines. We imagine an office that functions like a think tank, with design solutions as the core of our output.
Biggest challenge in running a successful practice: Controlling the ego. Much of architectural education and culture is built around the perspective of the creative individual. Originality and the implacable pursuit of a singular vision are taught and rewarded. This has its place but can be a hurdle to successful problem solving. Our power as architects is our ability to galvanize creative expertise around common purpose. The better we can get at suppressing the individual ego, the better we will be at steering teams toward excellent ends. In our office we make sure each individual has a voice in the creative process.
A social media account everyone should follow: Let’s all take a break from social media.
Biggest challenge facing architects today: Finding ways to serve broad populations
Most urgent policy question facing architects today: Fixing public housing
Most urgent political question: We would make a case for incrementalism. There is a macabre narrative all along the political spectrum today that the institutions of modernity have failed us and that every aspect of life is in a deepening state of crisis. In architecture, this manifests in revolutionary impulses that have roots in architectural history—claims that we should reject our past and our institutions to rebuild the world. Harder to find is a positive vision that sees the world’s problems against a background of progress. Architectural practice is slow, and the discipline requires foundational knowledge. Each project is an opportunity for thoughtful and specific action—incremental progress.
