When we receive the commission to plan a community, or to design a building, restore it, or change it whole or in part to accommodate a new use, we believe that the client conveys to us his or her aspirations for a better life. These may be the individual’s or a family’s aspirations as in the case of a residential commission, or those of a large number of people as in the case of an office building or a place for study or meeting place. We listen carefully because it is our task to produce an appropriate response by translating a program - the client’s words - into a highly abstract language of drawings - the architect’s geometry and mathematics - which will eventually become part of our physical reality through the human endeavor of building - literally the body of these aspirations.  In the process of realizing these aspirations, all the bricks of the building will add to more than just their meaningless sum, and infused with life symmetrical to that found in nature, will speak to, and of, all involved.

Given this premise, no matter how prestigious, mundane, or humble the task, we believe that it is in our grasp to make any building resonate with meanings so that its language may be understood by as many people as possible. As in literature, the relationships between words give them a multiplicity of meanings – the more ambiguous and complex these relationships, the more universal the language.  As in architecture, the relationships discovered in the process of design between a wall and its openings, columns, roofs and all other elements including its surroundings, environment, and history, are understood with universal clarity and individual comfort.

  In this context, we make the appropriate choices of materials and forms depending on their capacity to elucidate meanings and relationships, not on abstract ideas which might lead to expensive choices formulated to bridge the gap between a stylistic formality and a “thin” content. In a way, once we have discovered the meanings, we will always be able to express it in different words. Traditions are for us an infinite and vibrant source of inspiration which draws freely from the collective memory of shapes, functions and meanings, instead of a random exploitation’s of the forms of the past as a “grab-bag” from which the memory of a few details is occasionally extracted. The past is a quiet teacher always capable of planting the seeds in our thoughts for the solution of contemporary dilemmas.

  We believe that, because we do not try to superimpose an ideology of building or consistency of style thus imposing ourselves on our client, our “ways of understanding” and “ways of seeing” give us the methodology to address all aspects of architecture in their specificity no matter the scale or the budget. Unlike the familiar image of unity of the machine, architecture for us retains the complexities of life with its continuous renewal of individual and collective aspirations.