The practice
Nine people,
one workshop.
We are an architecture and interiors practice in Copenhagen. We stay small on purpose: every project is drawn by the people you meet.
Nine people,
01 — Position
Four things
we keep saying.
Not a manifesto. Just the arguments we end up having on every project, written down so we can have them faster.
-
Start with what is already there
A site has an orientation, a slope, a history and usually a building. The first move is to record all of it properly. The second is to keep as much of it as the project honestly can.
-
Design for the worst hour
Four in the afternoon in late November, not noon in June. A room that works then works always. It is an unglamorous test and it decides almost everything about a plan.
-
Let surfaces change
We specify materials that are allowed to age — stone that dulls, timber that darkens, metal that was grey on day one. A building that cannot weather is a building that only ever gets worse.
-
One element, three jobs
When a detail shades, carries and sets the planning module at the same time, it is finished. When it only decorates, it is not yet a detail.
02 — In numbers
- 0 Years in practice Founded in Copenhagen, 2012
- 0 Projects drawn Built, unbuilt and in progress
- 0 People Deliberately small
- 0+ Material samples Catalogued in the library
03 — Partners
Who you
will actually meet.
The partners draw. There is no layer between the conversation you have and the drawing that gets made.
-
Mara Okonkwo
Founding Partner, Architecture Founded STRATA in 2012. Works on the long arc of a project — site, orientation, and the way a building meets the ground. Profile -
Jonas Lindqvist
Partner, Interiors & Material Research Leads interiors and the studio's material library. Trained as a cabinetmaker before studying architecture. Profile
STRATA Studio is a concept portfolio. The people, projects and figures on this site were written to demonstrate the design system — they do not describe a real practice.
05 — Where it started
2012
Copenhagen
Two of us, one room above a joinery, and a commission to rebuild a fisherman's shed that everyone else had told the owner to demolish. It is still standing, and we still visit it.
The practice has grown to nine people and moved twice, most recently into a converted workshop on the water at Refshaleøen. What has not changed is the size of the thing we take on at once, or the rule that the person who draws a building stands on its site.
06 — Start a conversation
Nine people is a deliberate ceiling.
It means we take on four or five projects a year rather than forty. If you want the people you meet to be the people who draw it, that is the trade.
- Founded 2012
- Studio Copenhagen
- People Nine
- Projects a year Four or five