A slender residential tower of board-formed concrete, organised around a single vertical courtyard that draws daylight forty metres down through the plan.
View ProjectWe design quiet, enduring architecture — buildings that hold their ground without raising their voice. Each project begins with the site, the light, and the lives it will shelter.
Architecture is the patient arrangement of light, material, and silence. We are not in the business of spectacle. We are in the business of making places that remain — that age with grace, that ask little of their inhabitants and give much in return.
A door should open the way you expect it to. A wall should hold the warmth of the afternoon. A window should frame the sky as if it were the first time you had seen it. These are small ambitions. They are also the whole of the work.
We believe in fewer materials, used better — in concrete that remembers the formwork, in timber that darkens with the years, in stone that carries the mark of the hand. We believe a building is finished not when the contractor leaves, but when the first occupant sets down their coat.
Everything else is style. We are not interested in style.
Every site has a memory. We listen before we draw, reading the land, the wind, the path of the sun across a single year.
Concrete, timber, stone, plaster. Materials used for what they are, never imitating something they are not.
The detail that disappears into use. A threshold you cross without noticing — until you notice how right it feels.
A building should outlast its architects and its first program. We design for the second life, and the fifth.
A slender residential tower of board-formed concrete, organised around a single vertical courtyard that draws daylight forty metres down through the plan.
View ProjectA tea pavilion and gallery on the edge of the Philosopher's Path. Cedar, paper, basalt — a single roof held by six columns, no more.
View ProjectA weekend house cantilevered over the pine forest on six steel pins. Two concrete slabs, full-height glass, and nothing between the occupant and the Atlantic.
View ProjectA headquarters for a publishing house. A gridded concrete facade gives onto a full-height internal atrium — a single room that holds the whole company.
View ProjectA passive house in the Lubéron. A single angled roof of photovoltaic tiles faces south; thick limestone walls hold the cool of the night through the afternoon.
View ProjectThe restoration and reinvention of a 19th-century courthouse as a public library. Six original columns retained, the interior gutted and rebuilt around them.
View ProjectOur process is deliberately slow at the start and fast at the end. We would rather spend three months understanding a site than three weeks undoing a mistake.
Site visits, conversations, archival research. We map the existing before we propose the new — the wind, the neighbours, the history, the budget.
Sketches become models become drawings. We test in physical material — clay, cardboard, plaster — long before we render in pixels.
We remain on site. Weekly visits, weekly minutes, a single point of contact. The drawing is a contract; the site is the proof.
A year after handover we return. We measure how the building has been used, what has shifted, what has held. The lessons feed the next project.
A selected list. We are grateful, and we try not to mention it on the building.
FORMA was founded in 2008. We are sixteen people across three studios, working on no more than nine projects at a time.
Trained in Milan and Zurich. Elena leads the residential practice and the studio's material research. Teaches at the Politecnico.
Joined FORMA in 2012. Kenji leads the cultural portfolio and our Kyoto studio. Formerly of SANAA, specialist in timber and joinery.
Leads the commercial and adaptive reuse work. Marcus trained in Stuttgart and brings a structural engineer's discipline to every drawing.
Inês leads our Lisbon studio and the interior architecture practice. She believes the door handle is the most important detail in any building.
A selection of publications that have written about the studio. We are always happy to send review copies and drawings on request.
We take on a small number of new commissions each year. If you have a site, a brief, or simply a question, we would be glad to hear from you.