SHoPprofile

SHoP Firm Profile

Rather than focusing upon a vocabulary of pliant and reconfigurable forms, our office is researching a procedural agenda, or practice, that is pliant and reconfigurable. We believe that constructs of architecture respond, by degrees, to the influence of forces present in their environment. Our research on the generation of space and form has led to the development of systems that can be configured to address and respond to variable influences of context. Here a new definition of context must be used: the confluence of financial, physical, social, temporal, and legislative influences that prepare a thickened membrane within which an architectural intrusion can be inserted. Each project attempts to develop a methodology of insertion and to create a conceptual engine supple enough to respond and react to external forces while maintaining the projectąs integrity, spatiality, and coherence.

These provisional typologies do not represent nor reflect a formal condition that can be equated with a single origin or physical contextual source, but rather are understood to be stimulated by multiple actions or disturbances emitted from the surrounding fields. The deployment of a design intent into a field of play allows the responsive typological system to search for the dissolution of boundaries and generate a network of ambient unities that are both singular and continuous. The results should not be viewed as the implementation of smoothed difference, but rather they provide a comprehensive and ambient blending of events and context into implied multivalent arrays, protean trajectories, and labile forms.

The office believes that this discourse can only be understood through actual construction, utilizing both spatial and non-spatial agendas to reach the point of translation between conceptual and physical solutions. that is open, gestural, revealing, and precise.