Common Projekts

Common Projekts is an architectural design firm in New York. We design homes, storefronts, and commercial spaces, and we renovate buildings that deserve better than what the last renovation did to them, and through all of it we keep returning to the same two questions: what is this space actually made of, and what does it want to be once the decoration comes off?

Much of the job is subtraction. What survives the subtraction is structure, material, and light. That turns out to be plenty.

We handle projects from early concept through construction administration, drawings, specifications, permit filings, contractor coordination. The full scope, with one point of contact throughout.

A building should tell the truth about how it was made. That idea is older than the firm by about two centuries, and we came to it the way most people come to their convictions: by inheritance. A long line of architects and designers, working in different countries and different materials and different decades, kept arriving at the same handful of conclusions, and we have spent years studying what they left standing.

From the oldest branch of that line we take the belief that a building owes the street clarity and a certain civic seriousness, and that ornament has to earn its place or leave. From the modern movement we take the frame, the open plan, the honest joint, and the nerve to let a structure stand in public wearing nothing but what holds it up. From the concrete generation we take weight: the conviction that rawness is an ethic before it is a look, that a wall poured against rough boards remembers those boards for a century, and that seriousness in a building is a form of respect for the people who live inside it. From a quieter branch we take patience with materials. Materials have opinions about what they become, and the place where two of them meet is where a building either tells the truth or begins to lie. From the masters of emptiness we take the void: the understanding that a bare room with one good source of light can settle a person more completely than any amount of upholstery. And from the great designers of chairs and lamps and door pulls we take the discipline of the ordinary object, resolved so thoroughly that you stop noticing it. Being ignored like that is the highest compliment an object can be paid.

Stack all of it up and it comes to something short. Structure does the talking. Material and light carry the feeling. Decoration is what you reach for when those three have failed, and the whole practice is the effort not to let them fail.