BFDO: Assemblies

Founded in 2007 and led by its principal Alexandra Barker, BFDO Architects works across sectors to probe the division between public and private space. At the heart of the practice is a long-term investigation into how materials, structures and systems inform, reshape and blur this distinction. By delving into a cross-section of projects - from acclaimed single and multifamily residencies in Brooklyn, to institutional and retail projects like the Maple Street School and the Body Factory Midtown, to propositions like Chromatic Energy Landscape that fuse engineered technologies with ecological processes like photosynthesis and algae production - this eponymous publication highlights the diversity and ingenuity of BFDO Architects' practice. Flowing through a thematic structure that is porous and intersectional, BFDO: Assemblies is not intended as a round-up of independent projects but instead presents itself as a selected outcome from a larger cluster of ongoing material and spatial research.
This publication situates BFDO Architects' work in the context of topical discussions including ecology and the landscape, multigenerational architecture and design, and the role of fabrication technologies in producing new relationships to space and place. Emblematic of a new generation of architects and designers that work across typologies and scales to answer the stakes of architecture and design within the twenty-first century, BFDO Architects navigate topics of public space and circulation, technology, sustainability and materiality. The result is a seamless web of built work and propositions that escape easy categorisation, and are as much a lesson in practice as they are in theory.