Firm name: Independent Architecture
Location: Denver
Year founded: 2009
Firm leadership: Paul Andersen, AIA
Education: B.A., University of Pennsylvania (Penn); M.Arch., University of California, Los Angeles
Experience: RJC Builders plus a handful of short stints in architecture offices. I teach at University of Illinois at Chicago, have also taught at the Torcuato di Tella University in Argentina, Harvard University, and Cornell University. I’ve been a guest curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Denver and the Biennial of the Americas.
Firm Size: Two
Mission:
We try to design projects that are thoughtful and original—with particular attention to form, repetition, and suburban culture.
First commission:
Our first commission was a children’s play area at the MCA Denver. The project was small, but it worked as a big model for some ideas that we were developing for a block of houses.
Favorite project:
Any project that allows us to use repetition in different ways. In some cases, such as Five Rooms (designed with Paul Preissner, AIA, for the Chicago Cultural Center), repetition produces excess. In others, it’s a function of variation. We combined both strategies for a courtyard dorm building at the Catamount Center for Environmental Science & Education, in Woodland Park, Colo.—identical rooms are arranged in semi-regular bars that spiral and stack.
Second favorite project:
Plans for a series of houses that take an unorthodox approach to modular design. They’re all made of the same prefabricated steel barn panels—which come in three shapes—but the panels are assembled in varying sequences to give each house a unique profile.
Our method is the inverse of a modern kit-of-parts strategy, where houses share a common form but have different assortments of panels.
Architecture hero:
Oswald Mathias Ungers, because he used rational design principles to produce beautifully irrational architecture. His own house is a paragon of minimalism, but with 177 doors, including six in the surrounding hedges.
Modern day architecture hero:
The redoubtable architectural historian Robert Bruegmann. He is eternally curious and takes nothing at face value.
Special item in your studio space:
Full size fabrication studies for cruciform bubble gum columns, pages from two copies of Robert Venturi, FAIA’s Mother’s House that we cut out so that we can compare the versions side by side, and scale replicas of every carport in Englewood, Colo.
Design tool of choice:
Laptop, pen, scrap paper, books
Memorable learning experience:
Penn English professor Alan Filreis—a great champion and scholar of modern and contemporary poetry—taught me that history is plastic. It’s liberating to know that histories can be designed.
When I'm not working in architecture, I:
Write the family dictionary with my kids. Recent additions include definitions for accestuator, amn’t, Ancestor of the Fee, collaptionist, ginzagar, huhonomous, outwich, recombobulate, and wom, among others.
The best advice you've ever gotten:
If you accept that architecture has no inherent value, you’ll be free to do some really amazing work.
Supersitions:
I didn’t name any of my kids after a living relative. And 28 is a lucky number—it’s a perfect number, it equals the sum of its factors.
