If you ask any architect to describe their field, you'll find no two answers are the same. Yet at DJA, we're guided by a shared understanding of the purpose and the practice of architecture. We believe architecture is and always should be in accordance with the following tenets; however, we allow these beliefs to manifest themselves in unique ways as each of us grows and hones our independent craft within this shared framework.

WE BELIEVE

Architecture is the ferocious pursuit of presence to actualize absence.

We put objects into the world to achieve some kind of resonance. We may be searching for timeless qualities of strength, utility and beauty or contemporary qualities of strangeness, ambiguity or the uncanny. We put forms and shapes into the world iteratively ad infinitum to test these resonances. It is a tireless pursuit and all the while the thing we are looking for is the very absence of things. SPACE. This lovely paradox is what drives all the work.

Architecture is an overarching discipline.

Architecture is a way of thinking and operating in the world. This is why other professions and industries co-opt the term, for instance, ‘the architecture of the software’ or ‘the architect of the bill’…The discipline itself is surely not limited to the design of buildings. Architects throughout history have designed teapots, automobiles, cities and everything in between. This inherent opportunity, coupled with a certain amount of restlessness, has always emboldened us to accept all types of design challenges at all scales.

Architecture is new every time.

Form, collaboration, invention, and engagement generally describe a kind of trajectory we strive to produce afresh each time we are given the opportunity to design something. We do not come to any problem with a pre-set agenda. We believe every design problem contains the capacity to engender discovery. As a way of combating pre-determination, we attempt to engage each project on its own terms mining it for potential partnerships, techniques, systems and modes of operation. Despite the tyrannical forces of economy and fashion we continually strive to maintain a non-specialist experimental approach.