Everyone at Design ALT + TAB stays close to the drawing, the client and the site. Our culture rests on clear responsibility rather than heavy process. Curiosity about how things are built holds the studio together.
The studio hires people who want to understand the whole of a project rather than one stage of it. An architect here will spend time with the joiner, sit in client meetings and walk the site in every season. This breadth costs some efficiency in the short term, and it produces designers whose judgement can be trusted at every scale.
New people are put on real decisions early. That works because nothing is decided in the abstract: a section is tested in model, a joint is mocked up, a mix is trialled with the mason before it is specified.
Being wrong in public is routine. The studio would rather find a flaw in a prototype than defend it into construction, so a failed test counts as progress and gets treated that way. People who need to be right all the time do not last here, and people who like to find out do.
Every trial leaves a record. Material tests, mixes, failures and the reasons behind them are documented and kept, so each project starts further along than the last one did. The studio’s real asset is this accumulated judgement, and everyone who joins adds to it and draws from it.
The studio works in places where building culture, language, climate and craft differ from one another completely. It treats this range as a source of ideas.
Every new place begins with study. The studio learns the local codes, the local sequence of construction and the local trades before it draws, and it designs within that way of building rather than against it. A design that ignores how a place builds will be value-engineered into something else, and the studio would rather start from reality.
Teams are built around the place. Local engineers, consultants and specialists join the design conversation from the start, and their knowledge carries the same weight as the studio’s own. The studio brings its method and its standards to every project, and the people who know the place supply what no visitor can.
The studio treats climate as a design problem. Orientation, shade, cross-ventilation and water are settled in the site plan, before any of them becomes a question of equipment.
Material follows the same logic. Thin shells use a fraction of the concrete a framed structure needs, and long spans remove structure that a heavier habit would add. The studio chooses stone, brick and timber where the supply chain is short and where the craft to work them is nearby, because a material’s distance and its making count as much as its face.
Longevity is part of the same argument. A building that people want to keep serves the climate better than one that must be replaced, so the studio designs for how materials age, how uses change and how a building can be repaired by the people around it. Durability is a design decision, and it is made at the start.
Shade, orientation and air movement are design decisions for us instead of problems to be solved with equipment later.
Thin-shell and long-span work is pursued partly because it does the same job with less material.
Stone, brick and timber sourced close to site, worked by trades who already know them.
The practice was founded and is led by a woman in a field where that is still unusual, and it works across countries where building culture, language and craft differ completely. Both facts shape how the studio hires and how it listens.
The work itself demands a range of backgrounds. Projects cross countries where people live, build and gather in different ways, and a studio that all thinks alike will miss what a place is telling it.
On every project, the people who know the place and the craft have standing in the design conversation. Work made at full size counts for more than the name of a school or a previous office at Design ALT + TAB.