Our work seeks to apprehend, with rigorous precision, those primary moments of architecture, in all their intensity and nuance.

Somewhere between the conceptual and the perceptual there is a condition in which architecture resonates most profoundly.  It is a state that appeals to the intellect and to the senses simultaneously, a position of clarity that gets at the essential meanings of things.

This condition is experienced on an unnoticed background level, but it is intuitively understandable by everyone.  Sometimes described as affect, atmosphere, or mood, it inflects the world with depth, and an intensified sense of temporality.  In a similar way to light, sound, weather, space, and time, architecture operates in this background, imparting the lightest physical touch on the body.  Yet there are those fleeting moments when attention brings the world forward, and we find ourselves enveloped in atmosphere, understanding things not in concepts or percepts, but in their most fundamental state.

Our mission is to work directly upon this background, to discover the conditions of architecture that yield these intensified experiences of atmosphere.  This opens up a vast research field, one that is less concerned with objects themselves, but rather the nuanced relationships between them.  Walls, roofs, columns, floors, and stairs are the matter of architecture, and can be manipulated easily enough.  But the most dematerialized form of matter available to the architect is that of atmosphere, and it is the instrument of our research precisely because it can traffic between the conceptual and the perceptual like no other material.