I thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes [1]

everything has fallen from me I scarce can tell where my being ends or the world begins nor do I care
I lay on my back in the gravel, the earth’s core sucking my bones, a moment’s giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus [2]

(now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened) [3]

[1]  taken from Xaipe #65, E. E. Cummings, 1950

[2]  adapted to the first person and reformatted from Suttree, Cormac McCarthy, 1979

[3]  taken from Xaipe #65, E. E. Cummings, 1950

We are an intentionally small architecture practice located in Raleigh, North Carolina. As practitioners and teachers, we pursue unique outcomes for each project that elevate the imagination for building in the American South. We are haunted by the vernacular buildings of our region that were built by the people that used them and imbued with the intelligence of necessity. Here, architecture has always been about building, sometimes with limited resources, but always with the goal of realization.

We work in a landscape searching for identity. We must sustain our naïveté to do work that negotiates between abstract expectations and real conditions, to create markers in a seemingly placeless environment, all the while resisting the anonymity of fad. We value architecture that is timeless and permanent in the way it reflects a long-term commitment to the quality of a place. This work is modern to the extent that it is provisional, made of common materials, suited to its context, quiet, practical, and unusual.

The work we do is endlessly varied and immensely fun. We devour precedent, building from local traditions of modernism and learning from current work farther afield. We remain pragmatic like our practical forebears, designing with the intent to build. Most critically, we aim to provoke our nearby building community to imagine a more thoughtful and well-made built environment – one that questions expediency, seeks deep connections to a place, favors material quality, and provokes wonder.