David Brown, AIA, is a registered architect with over 20 years of experience across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. A Harvard graduate, he leads design at Woods Bagot’s New York studio.
David led the design for One Journal Square in Jersey City, NJ, and OVER/UNDER at South Street Seaport in Manhattan. He has extensive experience with award-winning projects, focusing on innovative design solutions.
His notable projects include JFK Empire Sky Terminal 4, IGG in Fuzhou, China, and the Knox Street project in Dallas. Previously, David was a project architect at BIG and OMA, contributing to projects like VIA 57 West and Singapore’s Interlace.
What inspired you to become an architect?
I grew up in a family of builders. My uncle, grandfather, and his father before him ran a construction business where I worked for a couple of summers in early high school. I first fell in love with the craft of building. My grandfather had also learned how to draw house plans and would create custom homes for his clients. I found this intriguing and loved watching him draw on his Mayline parallel edge and the intellectual challenge of developing the plan. I then started to take drafting classes in high school. My first introduction to drawing was through a technical understanding of drawing measured plans. Later in college, I was exposed more to the artistic and aesthetic side of architecture, which I loved, but I always enjoyed making things with my hands like models, full-scale details, and furniture, and drafting beautiful well-constructed drawings.
How would you describe your design philosophy?
I try to find the essence of the project based on its context, brief, and the aspirations of the client. I therefore eschew a signature style in pursuit of finding the appropriate expression and approach for each project. An architect I greatly admire in this regard is Eero Saarinen who could design both the most fantastic expressionist architecture, such as the TWA Terminal, St. Louis Arch, or Ingalls Rink, and the most functional architecture, such as Bell Labs or John Deere HQ. I also strive to use honest and authentic materials as much as possible, and I seek sustainable solutions through passive systems that focus on human comfort.
Having worked on projects across North America, Europe, and Asia, how have these diverse cultural and architectural environments influenced your approach to creating mixed-use spaces and urban design?
I spent a long formative period working abroad and traveling through Europe and Asia, starting in college and then again after graduate school. I never traveled abroad until college, so I felt like I needed to be exposed to the world and used working in architecture as a mechanism to do it. It had a profound influence in several ways, getting more exposure to diverse cultures and ways of thinking created more empathy and inclusivity in my design thinking and a desire to create places of distinction that celebrate the particularities of a place. I was also introduced to high-density urbanism and a diverse range of public realm exemplars that provide a toolkit to approach design, from classical Western models of European plazas and piazzas to the futuristic hyper mixed-use developments in Asia; from the waterways of traditional canal towns like Venice and Suzhou to the laneway culture of Melbourne or the cycling routes through Copenhagen; and at a larger ecological scale, the stepped agricultural terraces of Peru or rural China that provide a really fascinating approach to microclimates using topography – the list goes on and on. I found it extremely helpful to see what kinds of spaces don’t work as well!
Can you tell us about your favorite project and why it stands out?
Early in my career, I had the great fortune to work on the Interlace residential project in Singapore while working in OMA’s Beijing studio. It is a constant reference point for how to completely rethink a building typology and create a new prototype of urban development. It takes what is normally a fairly bland typology repeated ad nauseum across Asia – a field of point towers – and recasts it as a series of stacked bars that frame communal courtyards, sky terraces, and roof gardens that weave a tropical biophilic nature throughout the buildings. It offers a new model for how humans and nature can cohabitate in a high-density design. The prototypical approach to housing innovation was incredibly inspiring.
You mentioned a transformative year spent in Paris during your college years. Can you elaborate on how this experience has shaped your architectural philosophy and approach to large-scale urban projects?
Simply put, it was an eye-opening experience for a kid from the suburbs of Atlanta and gave me an intense interest in cities and urbanism and a desire to become a citizen of the world. That desire to interact with people from different backgrounds and learn about other cultures in meaningful exchange has stuck with me. Here’s an example of how that subconsciously influenced one of our designs. We recently had the opportunity to participate in a design competition for an embassy of a Middle Eastern country in Beijing, China. Our design proposal sought to fuse the architectural and landscape spaces together to create a place that represents the best of both cultures in a series of interconnected spaces that create a place of social, cultural, and economic exchange. We started with areas of commonality – the archetype of the courtyard and the arch, which are fundamental building blocks of the architecture of the two countries. We also amplified the differences through material expression and landscape design. The building’s outer form was a simple rectangle clad in the local gray brick of Beijing that was then carved away to reveal a limestone surface that represented the dunes and local stone of the embassy’s native country. Large parabolic arches cut through the block to create a dynamic interior courtyard where the consulate, which serves the Chinese population looking for visas, and the Embassy’s residences, had visual transparency but were physically separated for security reasons. The interior was treated as a landscape of exchange – the consulate featured a traditional Islamic garden and the residences featured a traditional Chinese garden so that each was confronted with the other.
What is your favorite architectural detail? If possible, share a detailed technical drawing and explain it, along with images that help illustrate how this detail is useful to architects.
I think we are always excited about what’s on the boards, and a detail I’m looking forward to being realized is the façade of the apartment building in our Knox Street development in Dallas. It is a precast concrete façade system and we designed it as a frame with a scalloped cycloidal arch at the lintel of each window that seamlessly blends into a concave pier. What excites me about the detail is it is loaded with references. The cycloid arch is a nod to the vaults of the nearby Kimball Museum by Louis Kahn. In geometry, a cycloid is the curve traced by a point on a circle as it rolls along a straight line without slipping, so we used it to also reference the wheels of trains that used the Katy Trail, an adjacent rail trail beloved by the people of Dallas. At the same time, it was originally inspired by the arches of the Mondadori Palace, one of my favorite projects by Oscar Niemeyer. Whereby his frames were ruled surfaces made by essentially lofting a parabolic arc to a rectilinear outer frame, our scallop inverts this by lofting a straight line at the window head to the outer cycloid arc. And that’s probably too much info on a single window detail!
One built detail that I really love is the bench of our over/under kiosk, a small but really fun project we did at Pier 17. I think the moments when architecture receives the body are always special, like the built-in chaise longue in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie bathroom. The kiosks themselves are comprised of a single mass ‘split’ into two with the same sinuous curve in a kind of yin/yang relationship. We built it, with our fabrication collaborators Kammetal, out of over 800 cylindrical aluminum tubes. The ‘Over’ kiosk had a large cantilever that required a steel framed ‘foot’ to resist overturning since the temporary nature of the kiosk we couldn’t build a footing into the ground. We clad the ‘foot’ in a sensuous, curved bench made from wood. It turned a structural necessity into something beautiful, and playful, and, most importantly, it inspires human interaction.
I will often go to the pier and see a couple of people sitting on the bench, even if the rest of the space is empty, as I think it provides shelter and intimacy – and a great Instagram background!
Do you have a favorite material?
I have always loved the warmth and tactility of wood and exposed concrete, particularly when they are used together and even more when it’s board-formed concrete! I think it’s one reason I love tropical modernist architecture so much. The low embodied carbon of wood is of course amazing and I’m excited about the advances of mass timber in the construction industry. In a similar vein, I am inspired by the research in carbon capture and using recycled materials to improve the carbon footprint of concrete, and alternatives to traditional concrete like hempcrete and rammed earth. It’s amazing to see the innovation that is happening with earth building in Europe, particularly Switzerland, which also helps get people out of the mindset that it can only be used in the southwest US. I would love to do a rammed earth building for one of our next projects!
What is your process for starting a new project?
We start with an intense research phase on the place – its history, the natural landscape, and vernacular buildings to understand the native materials and passive climate strategies, urban morphology and traditional land use patterns, zoning, and site constraints, the climate, and forecast for climate change to understand how to future-proof our buildings. We create return briefs for the clients to ensure that we understand their vision, needs, and aspirations for the project. And we start to sketch – by hand, in the computer, in models – to iterate and quickly test various site and massing strategies. We like to include our clients in this process to tease out a solution together – we believe in co-creation more than a master vision. Once the form and massing start to take shape we think about the materialization and imaging of the project, often through place narratives that help a project get rooted in its context.
How do you balance creativity and practicality in your designs?
I often believe the best architecture happens when the pragmatic becomes poetic, and I get immense pleasure in solving challenging design problems with a beautiful, simple solution.
What role does the surrounding environment play in your architectural projects?
Our work is in constant dialogue with its context, and it always has to stake a position vis-a-vis the surrounding environment. Sometimes that position is sympathetic, sometimes it is confrontational; sometimes we allow our buildings to background itself to nature or a culturally significant structure, and sometimes it needs to foreground itself and claim more attention. That response is something we think a lot about and also work with our clients to understand their desires. We often craft narratives about the projects to give them an identity that is relevant to the urban and cultural context we are working. Here are a couple of examples. In Fuzhou, we designed an HQ for a gaming company that is currently under construction. We originally won it through a design competition in 2020. In this project, the immediately surrounding context was rather banal so we decided to lean into the cultural, historical, and natural context to create a unique vision that resulted in an iconic structure that suited the brand identity of the company. We developed the concept of the building around the Banyan Tree because we found out that they are deeply rooted in Fuzhou’s culture and history, and a symbol of sustainability and longevity. Nearly 900 years ago Zhang Boyu, the local governor, decreed that every family would be required to plant a Banyan tree to help cool the city – he was already dealing with the urban heat island effect that long ago! We loved the concept of the banyan tree and thought it was fertile territory for design exploration as they are unique both structurally and spatially, with its large canopy and aerial branches that create a unique interior realm. We loved the idea that the company, born and bred in Fuzhou, was giving back to its city with its version of a banyan tree. The trees are also a symbol of longevity – the oldest banyan in Fuzhou is over 1000 years old– so it supports the idea of a sustainable company with a long-term vision. In other places, like our Knox development in Dallas, we need to take a more sensitive approach to the context. There, we are creating a new high-density development in a beloved neighborhood and need to strategically mass the building to lessen its impact on the surroundings and develop a material concept that connects it to the history of the neighborhood.
How do you approach working with clients to understand their needs and visions?
Talking, asking questions, and listening – sometimes through formalized processes like campfire or visioning sessions, and often through multiple informal interactions. Also testing various strategies and using visualizations to help clients better understand what we are proposing so they are intuitively brought into the process as co-author of the design.
What architectural/design trends or movements do you find most inspiring?
I don’t know if it’s necessarily a trend, but designing for climate and wellness are two of the most important things I believe we as a profession need to focus on. I think these are intertwined and have some convergent solutions. Both will require material research, such as lower embodied carbon and low-VOC materials, which will probably create certain trends and ‘looks’ in the process and design for human comfort using passive systems in an increasingly hotter world. The fact that many architects’ opportunities are coming from ‘hot’ places (think Middle East, Texas, etc.) makes that even more interesting but challenging. Modern technologies allowed these areas to retreat from the sun into hermetically sealed air-conditioned buildings but the current desire for a more activated public realm and open space will lead to some exciting solutions from the design professions.
Your work, such as the One Journal Square and Knox Street projects, involves creating dynamic urban spaces that integrate life, work, and leisure. How do you balance the distinct demands of these mixed-use environments while ensuring each project remains unique and true to its locale?
I feel a bit like a broken record here, but really diving deep into the specific location and context is important, and that is as much the material and physical context, but also the historical, cultural, and climatic context as well. Every project is unique – the brief, the client’s vision, the site, etc. The design of these places cannot just be rote or mimetic, it needs to provide something new and different to its location to attract the end users, whether that’s through the placemaking and retail strategies, offering new types of spaces, or experiences that don’t exist and might provide a new insight into the place.
What advice would you give to aspiring architects?
Architecture can be a challenging but deeply rewarding profession – you work hard but you create a framework for the experiences of everyday life and the interaction between the built environment and the natural world. There is not a one-size-fits-all approach – there are several ways to be an architect or be involved in the profession so play to your strengths and develop your process and point of view. Look around, stay curious, and stay connected to the humanity that is required for us to keep making meaningful and inspiring places for people.
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