FreelandBuck is an architectural design practice based in New York and Los Angeles affiliated with Yale and Woodbury Universities. Our office focuses on research and design, exploring the overlap between academia and practice. At a point when digital architecture is nearly two decades old, our work assumes that fabrication and construction can enhance the spatial and sensual qualities of digitally designed form rather than compromise them. By articulating the patterns inherent to structure, construction and material, we invigorate forms and spaces with specific character and rich atmosphere. We seek to design evocative buildings that engage with the 'language' of atmosphere and affect with which we negotiate our social and political worlds. In this context, walls, ceilings and floors become emissive boundaries that infuse space with character, making them habitable and memorable. As environments for human interaction, our work exploits both formal undulation and graphic variation - of pattern, color and material - to synthetically enrich surface and space. At the scale of the city, pattern also holds an inherent organizational logic. Our design research explores complex configurations of natural and infrastructural systems supple enough to insinuate themselves into the existing geometry of the city. Patterning, unlike smooth topological surfaces, collects disparate fragments and allows for moments of inflection: differentiation, distinction, or disillusion within a continuous system. As both an organizational and design strategy, patterning suggests "re-grounding" digital architecture in the material world.
