Finding what a building can be, through conversation and through the place itself.

QAI is an architecture office. We design buildings, and alongside the design work we carry out research and develop our own tools on the relationship between space and the people in it.

• What kind of life do you want to live?
• What kind of work or venture do you want to grow?

Whether it is the interior of a single apartment or a building on a large scale, the same core approach runs through the work: we begin by listening to the people who are making it, and by reading, carefully, the hints already present in the place. Rather than applying a form or a style decided in advance, we want to find the architecture that suits these people and this place.

To do that we rely on the experience and judgement of the architect, and we also bring in computation and AI for Science. We study the light and the wind, the connections to the surroundings, the way people move — so that we notice possibilities our own assumptions would have passed over. What we find, we share; and working within the budget and the conditions of building, we make the space together.

A building, once made, goes on acting on the life and the work that happen inside it. And while the form of a building is not easily changed, the lives of the people in it, and the society around it, keep changing.

• To answer what is wanted now, properly, and still be able to take on uses nobody has yet imagined, and changes still to come.
• Not to settle what a place can be on the architect’s imagination alone.

Through what conversation and place reveal, QAI aims at architecture whose possibilities keep opening out, together with the people who use it.