Category: Thoughts

We have worked for the last 5 years on projects in the Philippines—an archipelago located 5,000 miles away. On a map, the Philippines floats, just above the equator, more like a constellation than a country between China to the north, Vietnam and Indonesia to the west and the Pacific Ocean to the east.

The history of the Philippines has been marked by this floating geography. Chinese traders, Hindu merchants, Muslim chieftains, European missionaries all crossed its waters. The country is a collection of things that have never truly been unified: islands, tribes, dialects, ethnicities. The Filipino sensibility has evolved to work within this idea of a loose amalgam.  Hybrid identities are a norm in this place. To design here requires a different understanding of order. We have come to think of scatter and spread as its own kind of organization. People and spaces in the Philippines are almost constantly   drifting apart. Our drawings seek out connections, mining the points of instability in with so much room between identities. 

We are in Brooklyn yet our plane of projection is a distant archipelago with fifty seven dialects and an urban population of over sixty five million people. We have designed homes, pavilions, hotels, office buildings, four churches and an airport there. Our methodologies have become married to the local knowledge we have found. We have started to replace of solidity and legibility in architecture with branching, drifts and other technologies of itineracy.  

The story of the Filipino has become our research agenda. We have studied its history, economy and explosive diaspora obsessively. Diagrams of migration, mixed breeds and successive political revolutions fill our studio. Our work develops geometry as a means to think of loose structures of association. Our ambition is to share our excitement for this culture through our  formal experiments. We are convinced that architecture must work through the physics of our social realities.  

We are outsiders to this place. I was born in the Philippines, moved to the U.S. twenty years ago and now travel back several times a year. I have certain connections to the Philippines and New York city yet I remain a foreigner in both places. Being without a place has informed our idea of what cities should be. We think that foreignness is what binds us. We are all slightly unmoored. Our prescription for the future of our profession is to practice in this hyperlocal style through our shared reality of exile.

The place
has affected our view of the future.  Drifting
Colonial powers crossed it, Pirates patrolled its showers
The Filipino is predisposed to diaspora.
We are in brooklyn. Like many studios in the city we been host to architects from around the world. We have sought jobs

Our methodology is informed by the loose

Our practice has evolved in tandem with our knowledge of this country.
The said archipelago has more than  7,000 islands making it the second largest in the world.

Economic dependency


A story of development based on the reality of a service economy. In other words, products were less important than the cultivation of personal ties
Our relationship to t

We have explored  some of its geographies but remain humbled by its dispersed reality. Everything we have learnt about this country has informed our practice.


Collection of tribes
Loose filial structure
Branching associations.

As we enter the age of artificial intelligence, our attention is being drawn further from the physical world with each new technological breakthrough. The emergence of new applications like ChatGPT, simulating text, and visual “deep fakes,” question the authenticity of our likeness, accentuating the gap between individuals and their surroundings. While this technology has the potential to transform nearly every facet of our lives, we find ourselves at a precarious crossroad with respect to how we view, manage, and interact with our surroundings. 

As an architect, I believe the answer lies in paying attention to our built environment. Our buildings manage and control our relationships to our environment. They move air, process water, hold waste, consume energy, and transform the soil in complex metabolic processes that enable us to persist. The very best of contemporary architecture represents our brightest ideals for regulating our fragile environment.

The simple act of paying mind to our built environment rather than our digital devices may appear obvious, yet the cultivation of individual attention remains, as Justin E. H. Smith writes, an act of resistance in our attention-extraction economy. To pay attention to architecture today means to take time to look at our buildings in their setting, to imagine how the rooms in our homes create a domicile, to measure the proportions, temperature, and humidity of a new space with our bodies and to think about how the structures we built make the people we have become. 

Neuroscientists are finding that our brains think through space. The cells in our minds, such as the hippocampus, subiculum, and entorhinal cortex process information through cognitive mapping. Boundaries, directional flow, and locational points provide our minds a scaffolding-like understanding of space which in turn serve as cognitive structures to organize other mental facilities such as language and spatial relationships. 

Architecture works in tandem with our brains. The concepts suggested by our built environment are not independent of our engagement with space. In fact, our built environment is only completed once occupied. Numerous recent books on the neuroscience of navigation such as Christopher Kemp’s “Dark and Magical Places” and Michael Bonds’, “From Here to There,” document  medical breakthroughs utilizing MRI scans that demonstrate how our brains employ spatial approaches to the processing of complex interactions.

Paying attention to architecture is a cognitive act with heuristic benefits. Heuristic tools help the human mind extrapolate solutions from little information. Architecture’s history of creating space for us to live can teach us something about how our minds work by  providing solutions to the spatial problems. Architecture is part of the our brains’ pattern language. Every built environment represents a set of spatial solutions on how to live in this world that our brains and those of others interpret and make use of. 

The deep interest in attention comes at a time when our grasp on our own intelligence has been shaken by the inconceivable discoveries of AI. Digitization has rendered human thought both “less contextual and less conceptual,” according to Kissinger, Schmidt and Huttenlocher, while paradoxically, our AI tools lack the ability to contextualize and reflect. We receive information today without a deep understanding of how it has been processed. Our lives are now being driven by technologies that are automated on a cascade of networked data fields that we cannot see. 

Every built environment is a project of world-building however small or mundane. The stories we conjure out of our built environment influence the way we build out our “real world”. When we pay attention to our built environment, we are addressing architecture’s cash value the way the pragmatist Philosopher William James would have instructed, asking what difference a building makes in the world. 

So as our world marches and stumbles from one crisis to another, let’s lift our heads, pay attention to our built environment and, in so doing, keep our minds sharp, noticing structures that help us determine and comprehend our emerging sense of collectivity. After all, it is this self-reflection that makes us human. 

“Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation.”

–Elaine Scarry

“beauty begins to appear when matter created becomes differentiated in terms of weight and number, circumscribed by its outlines, and takes on shape and color; in other words, beauty is based on the form that things assume in their creative process.” 

–Umberto Eco

It is impossible to argue against beauty in architecture. Who in their right mind would propose to live without beautiful structures? As a contemporary architect, the question is then not why but what. 

Today, one can build almost anything. The doors to architectural expression have been swung wide open. There is no dominant architectural style and the ensuing design freedom is riveting: we have a limitless power of imagination and interminable platforms for reinvention. 

The trouble is that beauty does not tell us what it is about. Beauty does not involve a didactic transmission of ideas. We know it when we see it. To encounter beauty is to become instantly acquainted with the mental event of conviction, as Elaine Scarry wondrously documented in her readings of the beautiful from Homer through Rilke. 

Beauty is an experience of momentary buoyancy. Beauty insinuates itself as a clearly discernible event. It is bound up with both a place and a time. In so being, beauty serves as a foil for our digitized environment. The speed and extensiveness of our communication networks rewrites the terms of architectural experience. 

Buildings are no longer objects of contemplation or even unmitigated distraction. The whale of social media and electronic exchange has swallowed architecture. Buildings are backdrops for the fantastical. We see them proliferate as images on screens dissolving the solid mass of material realism. 

The encounter with contemporary architecture beauty begins as a kind of personal epiphany then works its way out as a form of cultural exchange. It is perhaps a perfect counter-meme. Visit any famous site and witness its brash effects: countless people frantically snapping pictures to send instead of stricken still, as Odysseus once did, when confronted with the beautiful. 

What then does our contemporary model of split screen views and close-up social media declaratives say about contemporary architectural beauty? The assumption might be that fragments rule. Coherent singularities certainly seem preposterously nostalgic. And yet the work of some of our greatest architectural minds projects partial order over the broken hypothesis of deconstruction or postmodernism. 

Recent architecture production has been defined by the replacement of singular monumentality with open formats whose purpose is the management of complexity. The turn towards strategies of negotiation re-frames the question of beauty in terms of the creation and conservancy of difference. The beautiful project is, in this case, both verb and noun. It is a process of emergence and an experiential state.  

We operate in a territory of continued contentiousness wherein our strategies are meant to mediate. Our monuments are conceived as interfaces for an unpredictable mass of users. We think through scenarios and yet our professional situation is opposed to aesthetic singularity. Architecture persists because we all still hope that our physical structures are inseparable from cultural production. Given such a state, how do understand the creation of architectural legibility today. 

Contemporary architectural beauty is arresting because there is something about it that we recognize yet don’t know. The fact that a transformation of reality offers up something inexplicable represents a tear in the ontological fabric of beauty. The recognizable unknown posits a particular position on the transformation of matter. We cannot assume unmediated knowledge of the world. Our partiality is a given in our post-humanist age of continual crises. Building systems are widely parcelized, the construction industry is Balkanized and the execution of any project involves multiple constituents seeking consensus through design.

Western philosophy fixed architectural beauty to material achievement. Plato’s cave presided over reality as an approximation of an idealized environment. Architecture beauty was always a materialist breach. Buildings were shadows of a perfection we might partially glimpse. Aristotle’s paradigm of organic unity finds architectural beauty concomitant with mathematical completeness. The concept of totality precedes the object. Kant’s expression of the beautiful as “disinterested delight” further separates the material object from judgment establishing a disciplinary autonomy for architecture. 

The result is that the objectness of architecture goes unquestioned. Architectural beauty arises from essentialism. Buildings are  conceived as possessing an elemental identity distinct from their site, history or cultural production. The fact is, however, that we are today entirely rhizomatic. We seek out connections and are drawn to objects because of their ability to relate to other objects. Our sense of the beautiful circumscribes routes outward—perhaps we have lost the ability to safeguard our interiority given such the rapture with communication. 

Gadamer’s essay on the relevance of the beautiful imparts a model to think of beauty as an interactive event. The beautiful is an activity centered around the possibility of exceeding the logic of current systems of thought. Architecture’s materialism is a proxy to play with our limits as individuals defined by subjectivity and death. Play, for Gadamer, is how we create community through communication. The beautiful challenges us “to construct new compositions directly from the elements of the objective visible world and to participate in the profound tensions that they set up… it challenges each of us to listen to the language in which the world speaks and to make it our own.” 

The beautiful becomes an invitation to experience excess and create new means of communication to describe that which lies beyond ourselves. Like Einstein’s theory of how stars are made, beauty demands the creation of its own space as it expands. Beauty entails an eruption of pleasure. The event is an ontological task. The crystallization of beauty exemplifies a triumph in our ability to connect with something outside, to move past the imaginable and take delight in our exploration. 

Umberto Eco’s comparative treatise on the history of beauty established its inexorable mutability. Beauty we learned is not absolute. Its diverse history is directly dependent on our changing models of the universe. A reflection on contemporary beauty is, therefore, an exercise in self-consideration. If so then to dwell on it might uncover the aspects of our practice that agitate and touch us.     

Contemporary architectural beauty offers up the possibility to think of connectivity as an optimistic gesture. We not only discern something clearly but we are provoked to deliberate. We want to make connections back and forth with other places both real and imagined. The beautiful creates the desire to relate buildings to their contexts and histories— in short, it is to experience architecture as part of a group 

The encounter with the beautiful in contemporary architecture does more than simply focus our attention on how we see, as Robin Evans once described in his analysis of the Barcelona Pavilion. The beautiful can propose concepts. It can be Deleuze’s friend of wisdom whose “presence is intrinsic to thought, a condition of possibility of thought itself—in short, a living category, a constitutive element of thought.”

The beautiful in architecture translates the common principles of our physical world into the unpredictable instabilities of our social realities. It is an alchemical process of conceptualization. We can talk about new perfections in the work of Siza and Sejima or different truths in projects by Herzog and de Meuron or Miralles. The These architects produce singularities that acknowledge their contingent situation, reordering reality in a that is enduring and resilient. 

Contemporary architectural beauty requires ontological effort.  To actualize a new world through design is to be engaged in the production of imagined communities. Architectural beauty today is associative. Like a musician in an ensemble we cannot play without the group and yet our tune and medley holds a distinct personality that cannot be subsumed by another instrument. The harmony is enmeshed in the task of being together. To encounter the beautiful today is to watch how our world can be transformed into something better. 

We cannot help ourselves if our buildings evoke the conflicts that follow from the ways we understand ourselves. Beauty is an activity of creating concepts in architecture. Concepts do not wait. They must be made in response to social exigencies. If the beautiful has an optimistic structure it is that empathy results from the desire to transform physics into culture. 

As the world increasingly faces environmental challenges, CAZA leads the new wave of Metabolic Design—a vision rooted in renewal and responsibility. Guided by data, our studio reimagines architecture as a living system able to reconfigure resources and regenerate its surroundings. Through material recovery, energy efficiency, and nature-inspired processes, we create environments where waste becomes resource and construction becomes restoration. Our projects stand as steps toward a circular economy of architecture—one that honors the rhythms of the planet while shaping spaces that sustain both people and place for generations to come. 

Read more about our design research in our latest book, The Metabolism of Settlement Coexistences. 

Rewriting Elements of Constructed Environments in the Anthropocene Era

Authored by Carlos Arnaiz, Peter Rowe, and Claire Doussard, the book presents a new way to analyze a city’s environmental impact. It introduces a method to track the complete lifecycle of all the materials and energy a city uses. By creating this full “cradle-to-grave” picture, the book is a must-read for designers and planners who want to integrate metabolism into their work by identifying wastefulness in the flow of resources in relation to their use in the built environment and developing innovative design solutions to harmonize our communities and our planet. 

Learn more about Metabolism through purchasing the book here and all bookstores worldwide.

Our communities have always been mixed-use. Environmental volatility requires more from our settlements. They need to be both diverse and compact. Resiliency is a collection of spatial attributes that enables regeneration after the inevitable catastrophe.  

Architectural design accompanies every development. Progress as a function of growth is incomplete without a specific design approach towards productivity. Each successive  Industrial wave carries us forward. The intensification of technology, coupled with its miniaturization, means we can create new hybrids. 

Biomaterials open the possibility of promising composite design solutions.  Blended spaces for work, play, and make introduce novel job opportunities. Adaptive reuse, deconstruction, and the automation of mobility unlock infrastructure for recreational use.

We are living longer. Scientific breakthroughs are coming faster. The prospect of actively aging communities with unique needs is a challenge we have not faced. The socio-economic impact of these demographics is related but not identical in each geography: big city, small city, rich country, or poor nation. 

The corresponding system in every place is the healthcare network. How can we design a better health system to support the complexity of our societal body? What should we integrate into the clinical solution to broaden its efficacy? 

A distributive spatial approach to analysis and design connects health to ecological management, food security, and smart mobility. The future of humanity rests on addressing the imbalances in our human support systems. 

Mapping the extent of Regional metropolitanism across space and time unravels quantitative connections between our ability ot design regenerative places and the manner in which our distributive networks are organized. 

Clinics, hospitals trauma centrs nad recovery bays are the hard infrastrucre that can be designed with an outlook towards the integration of green and blue components. Nature is a regenerative system aht works in dsituvutuve networks. Architrciurre that articulate compound conenctiosn bwetene cultural nad natural systems can benign the work of keeping us healthy and happy. 

Architects have always been modular builders. We operate in a finite world with limited resources. The economics of time privileges efficiency. And efficiency begets the standardization of buildings into modular elements. 

Architects have been on a hero’s quest for the perfect modular system. Can there be an ideal kit of parts or a unifying detail that brings everything together? Can the design breakthrough solve interminable issues such as poverty or sickness? History foretells a sad string of failures. 

And yet today, every building is a complex amalgam of prefabricated parts shipped and then assembled into a home, school, hospital, or airport. The amount of information regarding all these parts constitutes a database of understanding that we could magnate and deploy with more intelligence to reduce waste, control cost, and forecast time. 

Our computational tools present the possibility to track and analyze these elements with a parametric lens towards optimization for variation. In other words tailored design algorithm can reduce complexity in construction while enhancing aesthetic effect. This will result in a more beautiful world for more people, as we can build structures with 

Architecture’s history is littered with attemto tos find

Architecture transforms nature. Every building takes away and gives back to the earth. Construction, at its most elemental, is the process of extracting raw materials to remake them into structures we can use every day. Our buildings are more than just machines for living. They activate a process of conversion and consumption. 

Architecture consumes energy, requires water, and permanently modifies matter. As the world loses faith in interdependence, our AI-powered economic future underscores the need for buildings that are both self-sufficient and smartly connected to their surroundings. 

Architecture cannot be hermetic. Our buildings depend on links to other systems to survive. A metabolic analysis of our built environment, calculating the flow and transformation of ecological inputs into the construction and operation of buildings, holds the keys to a post-scarcity future. 

Metabolic design enables prognostication: for how we measure is how we think, and how we think is how we design. We can analyze both buildings and human settlements from cradle to grave, enabling a way of seeing how our built environment will age, die, and possibly be reborn. The future can be designed better today….