Sensing Place

Spaces matter. They ground us and lift us; connect us to our thoughts, our surroundings, each other, ourselves. With the right team, the right process, and the right vision, architecture can elevate our experience of the everyday and the once-in-a-lifetime.

Rarely have I seen a project site that has no existing qualities of its own. We do ‘make’ Buildings (with the extensive help of builders, etc) but they only inflect Place. Our goal is to realize an existing place’s contemporary potential with an eye to the past and to the future. A successful project is one exquisitely appropriate to the parameters agreed upon by client and team early in the process.

Architects are trained to develop formal strategies for an idealized world. Yet the conditions out of which buildings develop are complicated and messy. These ‘defining’ circumstances evolve, if not wholly transform, during a building’s life. For architecture to survive and contribute to the world as we find it, architects need a design sensibility that marries the ideal, the circumstantial, and the inevitable. We need agility to address collective ambition with informed solutions. We need to be less concerned with how things look and more focused on what they do.

Studio Combine approaches projects in a way that evades isolation in our moment in time and primes the resulting design to adjust and anticipate future uses. Multivalent architecture yields multi-functional public space. How we work and what we achieve closely map our core values:

Excellence and Stewardship

We appreciate play AND we take our responsibility seriously. Our favorite projects throw away false dichotomies. They are elite and open. Erudite and accessible. Pristine and rough-and-tumble. We cherish Architect’s role as a learned vessel of art, culture, and history AND we relish rendering it more accessible to broader audiences. High and low or open and closed are far from mutually exclusive.

Multi-functional public spaces should perform to exceptional standards. We aspire to quiet excellence; highly resolved design unencumbered by pretension. We enjoy weaving safety, security, and tight performance parameters into a welcoming user/visitor experience.

Lifelong Learning and Collaboration:

Multi-functional public spaces are launch pads for collaboration and fertile ground for diversity. They encourage curiosity and lend agency to lifelong learning by providing a trustworthy fount of new experiences and information. Flexibility allows programmatic shifts among events, exhibition, and outreach programs for schools, youth groups, partner organizations, and the community.

Creating tunable public architecture demands the expertise of intelligent specialists. Realizing a vision is a highly involved process. At Studio Combine, we know the kind of effort it requires–the stakes, the stress, and the sacrifice. We consider it a privilege to guide clients on the epic voyage from concept through completion. Our charge is to sherpa your team through the pass, shouldering your burden and making sure you catch all the great views along the way.

Diversity and Inclusion:

Welcoming architecture celebrates all aspects of human difference. It posits an inclusive ‘We’ and eschews ‘us-vs-them’. Good design fosters empathy, one of the most valuable of all social skills. Magic can happen when people identify a place as a safe space.

The same goes for our work environment. Different ideas, identities, and perspectives make for a more robust team and lead to the best set of solutions. And the most fun.

Integrity and Accountability:

We will work with you to manage the project team and resources with the highest standards of ethical behavior. Our team punches above its weight by raising standards and valuing accountability. Adherence to high-quality standards leads to a better product; a better product leads to more accurate scheduling and costing; better scheduling and costing lead to a more efficient design and construction process. The resulting architecture expresses dignity and exudes integrity. It fosters pride and encourages care.