smaq

office for architecture |landscape | urbanism SMAQ designs environments. Within a reality of interwoven and counteracting components: buildings, landscapes and infrastructures SMAQ’s tactical insertions intensify modes of inhabiting the urban. SMAQ’s projects actively reflect the ecologies of the site. ‘DotsAndLoops’ and ‘Isotop’, for example, transformatively map the conditions found and emerge as permeable systems that recondition the given aggregate. Procedures of negotiation - like in the ‘Sarajevo Concert Hall’ design – generate architecture as the missing link between opposing components within the range of requirements and demands. In fully engaging the context, they are local catalytic interventions releasing potentials on a larger scale. SMAQ’s methods mesh the elastic thinking of diagrammatic relations with the physicality of precise volumetric and material definition. In the ‘NdokZ’ project the resulting flux between field and object sets free a joyful multidimensional spatiality. Since the exploration of the matter ‘site’ is understood as an integral part of SMAQ’s practice, the uncovering of spatial parameters beyond pure phenomenological categories has become a driving force for many of the works. Projects like ‘Highway Housing’ utilise the capacities to work with dependencies and motion within computer-aided delineation. The development of instruments to reveal trajectories of change and magnitudes of influence is subject of SMAQ’s investigating activities. SMAQ’s work has been recognised and awarded with the Egon Eiermann Award in 2000 and the Hans Schaefers Award in 2001 among others. In several international competitions SMAQ received prizes including Europan 5 in 1998 (runner up), the Sarajevo Concert Hall Competition in 1999 (honourable mention) and Europan 6 in 2001 (1st prize). Recently, the work has been published in deArchitect (Netherlands), Arquitectura Viva (Madrid), Wettbewerbe Aktuell (Germany). The Europan 6 winning competition entry ‘DotsAndLoops’ is currently in the process of being implemented.