Our Approach
As architects, we believe that what we make can improve the lives of people. We want to realize the idea of a better, richer place, made palpable through the shaping of space, place, form, and climate.

The places we make reflect our affection for ordinary human interchange and commerce, and for what lies beneath. People need to belong to something larger, to make connections with others and the world, and to make order out of chaos. So the architecture they inhabit needs to represent something larger than either the individual or the group, yet provide places where they can both be themselves and recognize the social and cultural structures that surround them.

We approach every project by working with the material of lived experience, our own and our clients, and in the context of our obligations to the public interest. It is through this process that we have come to understand the complex relationship between architecture and society, and between people and the environments they inhabit.

Our ideas about making places for people begin with the principle of paths. We define landmarks, portals, and passages, to create a legible framework in which life will unfold. We believe that space, path and structure, light, sound, and the revealed properties of materials, are cardinal architectural threads that can draw people to their humanity, experience their culture, and reveal the world. We root what we build in these properties.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PLACE
Our office is located in New Haven, Connecticut, on the campus of Yale University. A small city, one of the oldest planned European settlements in North America, and long a place of innovation in city‐making, industry, and education, New Haven collects within its fabric many great works of architecture, fine streets and streetscapes, neighborhoods, and public places. Our city has been an inspiration, laboratory and model for us. It has been an important guide to what works, what does not work, and what might yet work in architecture, in urban design, and in human affairs.