“ A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”

— Wendell Berry

History and tradition run deep in the South. And even deeper in New Orleans. Food and drink go down easy. Change does not. While others embrace an ethos of modernism and inflect it softly towards context, we revel in the complicated reality of the American South, abstracting it to create modern architecture that transcends its southern borders. Our architecture is a communal, inclusive one. Born of many hands at the table, shoulder to shoulder, disparate ideas and ideologies melding together in a wonderful bricolage. Solutions are not imported but extracted. Like all southerners, we love to talk, but we spend just as much time listening, responding to, drawing from, and amplifying culture in service of a contemporary context. Aesthetically, our take on tradition engages the functional and communal qualities of southern architecture, but not necessarily its ornamental adornments. Large apertures carved deep into facades reveal cool, covered spaces mirroring the respite of humid, southern homes: the front porch. Double-height communal spaces get hoisted into the air, sandwiched between floors, an acknowledgement of the region’s longstanding tradition of interior courtyards. Indeed, one of our primary building materials is nearly weightless. Light plays an equally important role as steel or glass—lending credence to the well-worn adage that what you put in is just as important as what you leave out. Projects, in turn, are rich and multivalent in meaning. Faith, resilience, renewal, craft, tradition, and invention wed together in a heady brew—an outcome greater than the sum of its parts.