COMMONPLACES working on an American architecture

As architects with decades of experience, we bring a commitment to creating shared communal places and we understand that a city – town, village, or campus – is an everchanging phenomenon. Our passion as architects has to do with how places evolve and our goal is to contribute to a forward-looking vision of what they can become – of how they can be an appropriate addition to what is already there.

Brian Healy is an architect who works within the modern American tradition. That is to say, he endeavors to engage the tradition of practice as exemplified by architects such as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis I. Kahn. It takes considerable courage to engage the American tradition of practice today, in a time dominated by an obsessive emphasis on universal “globalization,” and the parallel loss of local place, culture, and identity. Yet, as Paul Ricoeur stated over 40 years ago, while universal civilization is available around the world, and is desired by everyone, anywhere, there is no culture that is not local, that does not belong to a particular place. In his work, Healy endeavors to seek the essence of his discipline, architecture, as defined by its place and time – an American architecture, born of the commonplace and the vernacular, yet at the same time engaging the great works of our modern predecessors. – Robert McCarter