︎




—cultural

  1. Lindemann Performing Arts Center at Brown University
  2. Breaking Character
  3. Australian Performing Arts Center - Confidential
  4. Korean Cultural Project - Confidential

—housing

  1. Enfilade House
  2. All That is Solid Melts Into Air, or Reconsidering the McMansion
  3. One House Per Day: Element House(s)
  4. Kinetohaus
  5. Playing House
  6. Williamsburg Multifamily
  7. Windsor Terrace
  8. LowRise LA: Floating Bungalows
  9. 8x1 House
  10. Brentwood Residence
  11. Blackland Village

—retail

  1. NC Bar & Cafe
  2. Kingston Co-op Grocery

—installation

  1. Onda Wall
  2. Phantom Formwork
  3. A+D Museum:
    Misbehaving Monument
  4. Acrylic Mountains
  5. Paper Trails

—research

  1. All That is Solid Melts Into Air, or Reconsidering the McMansion
  2. Playing House
  3. One House Per Day: Element House(s)
  4. Learning from Lampasas
  5. Micropolitan Texas
  6. Computational Drawings

—media

  1. The Architect’s Newspaper
  2. Ghosts in the Machine
  3. A+D Museum:
    Misbehaving Monument
  4. A+D Museum Redux: Monuments to Maximalism
  5. A+D Museum Future of _Space: Corporate Marketecture
  6. Foam is the Future (ISSUE:Copy)
  7. Architect in the Machine
  8. Digital Baroque
  9. Flattening the Digital and the Phyiscal
  10. TEDxUTAustin, “Hyperobjects: Aesthetic Philosophy for Sustainable Architecture”
  11. Simplicity is Dead

—info

  1. drooopi is an architecture office rethinking where and how we live.
  2. drooopi offers architectural services for projects of all types, scales, and budgets: houses and housing; restaurant, retail, and brand experiences; arts centers; installations; and more. Our approach is grounded in finding dogmatically rational solutions that challenge presumptions, expressed with a refined and playful aesthetic sensibility.
  3. drooopi is technically a cheeky acronym for “Davis Richardson Office of Objects, Projects, and Images,” meaning we design and make drawings of architecture and related things. drooopi as a name implies the reconsideration of preconceived notions: a building that droops is typically considered to be failing. What opportunities are there for defying conventional wisdom that could produce better buildings, more interesting spaces?
  4. drooopi is led by Davis Richardson, a licensed architect in New York and Texas.
  5. Contact us for potential projects or media inquiries: daviswrichardson@gmail.com

Mark

work   info

drooopi



All That is Solid Melts into Air, or Reconsidering the McMansion 


Co-operative Housing
Suburbia, USA
1,500sf - 6,000sf
2023-ongoing

It could be said that there is no more ubiquitous, quintessentially American architecture than the McMansion, the archetype of the single-family home in recent decades. Ironically, this icon of American architecture is rarely, if ever, designed or considered by architects.

The rejection of the McMansion by the discipline is not without merit; it exemplifies the pre-2008 excesses of real estate speculation, American consumerism, suburban copypasta, racial segregation, and a general bastardization of the architectural canon. The great critic Kate Wagner has notably pointed to all of this in her wildly successful blog, McMansion Hell.

Yet, the McMansion has persisted. What has resulted from this rightful criticism is a major sector of residential building which is almost completely devoid of architectural input or imagination.

How can it be re-envisioned to support more diverse and affordable modes of living? Through the intervention of architectural devices, could the gaudy aesthetics of intersecting rooflines and mismatched, meaningless references be dealt with in a way that could be considered finally “worthy” of the discipline of architecture?

index    next︎
Running on Cargo