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



Manhattan Central Library Tower   

  There is a new arms race in construction today: sleek, glassy towers continue to pop up around in central Manhattan, from the supertalls south of Central Park to the newly-opened Hudson Yards. These buildings are as much, if not more-so, monuments to capitalism as they are spaces to live in work: bold in profile, symbolic on the skyline, with legible boundaries which make explicit who is in and who is out. These speculative building projects are made possible by developers who see a lucrative real estate investment; whether the end product can be occupied, lived in affordably, or worked in comfortably is secondary only to the revenue it generates.


In this architectural speculation, New York City has responded by some public backlash to the subsidization of these monuments, such as at Hudson Yards, by building a public supertall tower which is open and occupied by all: a brand new, massive central branch of the New York Public Library. For New York, the Central Library Tower is a chance to reclaim democracy in the sky, demonstrating that knowledge – not capital – is true, cultural power.



The Central Library Tower is a figural foil to the sleek curtain-wall supertall; it is a democratic collection and aggregation of components into a larger society, opposed a plutocratic, top-down imposition of envelope. The collection of objects from which the tower is formed are pulled from symbols of notable literature – lions, witches, wardrobes; Nimbus 2000’s and sorting hats; sperm whales; and much, much more – but are not one-to-one, literal appropriations of those things, but digital twins. They have been re-interpreted or borrowed from freely-accessible 3D-printed files (i.e. Aslan becomes a generic lion model; sunglasses become the “deal with it” meme) and re-combined, modified, distorted, multiplied, scaled, and morphed strangely together to create inhabitable interior and exterior spaces with emergent spatial conditions and object relationships to create something tangibly physical from digital parts (which, in turn, have their origins in the physical world).




While there is an oscillation between the digital and the physical in the reading of the project, there is also an oscillation between the recognition of individual objects (the whale, the conch, the flames), and the illegible distortion of the figural whole. This serves to democratize the project by grounding it in mainstream, accessible culture and by reminding us that one single interpretation (as in the iconic curtain-wall skyline profile) does not a democracy make, but a confusing, messy, beautifully-composed symphony of voices.