Q
Quartermaster / Question
Architectural design, from houses to public buildings
Think it through together.
Put it in order together.
Move the project forward.
With our clients and our collaborators, QAI gathers the knowledge, the techniques and the people a project needs, and raises the questions that carry it forward. Before we make anything, we ask, we look, and we think.
QUARTERMASTER
Put what is needed in place,
and keep the project supplied.
A quartermaster is the officer responsible for supply and logistics. For QAI the word stands for a stance: with the client and the collaborators, gathering the knowledge, the techniques, the people and the information a project needs — widening what is possible, and putting it all in order so that it can be built.
01
Connecting people and knowledge
Owners, architects, engineers, operators, public authorities — we connect people who stand in different places.
02
Putting the conditions in order
Site, regulation, technique, budget, schedule: we sort out conditions that come tangled.
03
Widening what is possible
Rather than staying inside the existing frame, we combine different expertise and different analyses, and look for options nobody has put on the table.
04
Staying with it to completion
From brief through design to construction, we keep the project supplied so that it goes on moving.
QUESTION
Doubt what has been assumed. Raise the question. Look for what is possible.
We do not take the given conditions, or common sense, as the starting point. We begin with a question. We look at what is there in the place and at what cannot be seen, and we study it carefully — with computation and data as well — to find possibilities nobody has noticed yet.
Where Q does its work
Finding what a site could be
We find new uses, and new value, inside the conditions that are already there.
Working with specialists of many kinds
We assemble the team the project actually needs.
Supporting it over the long term
We think as far as the running of a cultural facility, and the life of the town around it.
QAI Ltd., First-class Registered Architect Office
YS Garden 305, 2-1-8 Honcho, Nakano-ku, Tokyo 164-0012, Japan
Tokyo Governor Registration No. 58245