APPROACH
DESIGN
Modern architecture was born in the 1920s to bring great design to common people, at a time when architecture was dominated by a renaissance of classical and baroque styles affordable only to bourgeois society. By stripping away ornamentation and decoration, and drawing on the formal compositions emerging in abstract painting, architects made great design more attainable — while flooding buildings with abundant, playful daylight to promote the health and well-being of their occupants.
Unfortunately, this founding idea has eroded over time, worn down by an increasing preoccupation with style for its own sake. Modern architecture has become just another exclusive aesthetic, affordable only to the wealthy — losing touch with the very people it was meant to serve.
Our approach is to bring this idea back on track: to deliver great architecture for everyone. Rather than relying on formal composition alone, we ground our work in abstract conceptual thinking paired with careful attention to context, materials, detailing, cost, and function — using pragmatism and creativity as our guiding forces toward great design.
Architecture is not for the select few. It is for EVERYONE.
ENVIRONMENT
We take a green architectural approach that goes beyond minimizing embodied energy, operational energy use, site impact, and other standard sustainability strategies. We extend that thinking to ease of maintenance, operating costs, the culture and habits of building occupants, and even the energy and cost involved in the design process itself.
Saving energy goes hand in hand with a building’s maintainability and operation — ease of upkeep is a critical design consideration for the long-term success of any project’s sustainability goals.
We aim to use both our clients’ resources and our own responsibly — not only to save money, but to free up those resources for others in need.
SOCIAL JUSTICE IN ARCHITECTURE
We seek to bring social justice to architecture by considering those who have no voice in the design process yet still interact with it — passersby, visitors, children — and ensuring their needs are heard.
Architecture’s focus should be solving the social, human, and environmental problems facing a building and its context — not satisfying the architect’s own pursuit of heroic formal resolution. Architects should choose what works, not merely what looks compositionally pleasing to their own eye.
The top 1% can buy great design with their wealth; the bottom 5% are provided for by the government. The real challenge for every architect is serving everyone in between — that broad middle ground from the bottom 5% to the top 1%. That is social justice in architecture.
It is our mission to use our resources to provide affordable, thoughtful architecture to those in need, and to those who share our beliefs.
SERVICES
Architecture for Everyone provides a wide range of services for projects of any size. To us, architecture is problem-solving — regardless of scale or project type. Our project sizes have spanned accessibility upgrades, tenant improvements, remodels, additions, accessory dwelling units (ADUs), new buildings, and campus design/planning. Our project types have spanned residential, office, dormitory, church/chapel, museum, transportation, and education (K-12, college/university), among others.
We want to work with a variety of clients, and it’s important to us to work with those who share our beliefs, regardless of budget. We aim to be part of solving problems through design, adding value in both functionality and aesthetics. And we value our client relationships well beyond the life of any single project.
