click to enlarge; image from buildingstudio.netRecent Work of the buildingstudio

buildingstudio was founded by Coleman Coker in 1999 after a thirteen year partnership with Samuel Mockbee as Mockbee/Coker Architects. He is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He received his MFA from the Memphis College of Art and currently serves on its Board of Trustees as the Academic Affairs Chair.

buildingstudio is a small collaborative firm focusing on inventive and imaginative work, regularly acknowledged for its design excellence. It was founded with two principles in mind: First, to blur the boundaries between architecture, art, craft and thinking. Rather than separate disciplines, buildingstudio treats each as essential to the larger realm of building. And coupled with this, buildingstudio’s work explores built presence grounded in the experience of the real world, building as realized through a process of critical reflection. As such, their goal is to develop an ongoing ontological investigation where the meaning of presence is fundamental. Acknowledging this is primary. The skill gained through building fuels innovation and discovery which enlivens the design process. With these in the forefront buildingstudio works to develop the kind of built environment that heightens one’s experience of being in the world.

buildingstudio has designed projects from the Gulf Coast of the United States to the Alaska’s Cook Inlet, as well as having developed projects in Russia and Singapore. Their work has been highlighted in large-scale exhibitions at locations such as the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, MoMA in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art. Their work has also been shown at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

Coker is former director of the Memphis Center of Architecture, a collaborative program of design open to advanced architecture students in the region and sponsored by the University of Tennessee and the University of Arkansas. He has held the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture at the University of Arkansas and is the current Favrot Chair at Tulane University School of Architecture.