drooopi is an architecture office rethinking where and how we live.
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.
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?
drooopi is led by Davis Richardson, a licensed architect in New York and Texas.
Contact us for potential projects or media inquiries:
daviswrichardson@gmail.com
Single-Family Home, Strip Mall, Church, and Town Square/Parking Lot
Lampasas, TX
2019
If the highway ever dominates the town as the car is king, can the town adapt by creating architecture at the scale of and which facilitates and provides endless access to the car? Could we take the car-centric town to its logical end beyond the infrastructure? Can this seemingly regressive or conservative architectural intervention actually show the dead end that is a car-centric culture?
The intervention uses Lampasas, a small town an hour-and-a-half outside Austin, as a model for micropolitan America. The town is encircled with a new highway loop for infinite driving pleasure, and four new typologies emerge giving even greater access and glorification to the personal car: the new strip mall, the parking lot/tailgate town square, the drive-in church, and the drive-in home.
Following the legacies of No-Stop City and Learning from Las Vegas, the new strip mall images an endless system of canopies which merge sign and shed (in a digital, phone-GPS era) and glass “rooms” therein - motels, coworking, and retail.
The new house grows in order to make the car be central to everyday life, a piece of furniture within the living spaces.
The town square is extended into a massive, undulating parking lot for tailgating. Christmas string lights are reminiscent of the previous means of decorating the old square year-round.