A celebration of individual knowledge, talent and experience
guides the approach to our work.
The best works come out of the best working relationships when people are committed to searching for common ground while working constructively on meaningful projects. 30 years of practice has reaffirmed that cooperation is an evolutionary imperative.
Our curated team of professionals have worked for corporations, government agencies, and individuals on a wide array of projects. We have learned the value of working collaboratively and the benefit of listening with open minds, heightened curiosity, and a sense of great purpose. Most projects in our experience are realized within aggressive budgeting and scheduling parameters, and often with limited resources and conflicting objectives. But, with abundant optimism, limits can be a source of innovative thinking and inventive outcomes.
RoTo brings a trans-disciplinary outlook, with an architectural mind, to every aspect of a project and filters it through the conceptual and practical lens of what it takes to realize a project. We have a signature process, not a signature style. Projects begin in workshops - talking and drawing as we define the problem and its component parts to explore alternative approaches.
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Our creative dialogue presents new ways to think about a problem and deepens our understanding of how best to convert a vision of a client into high performance, exceptional architecture.
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Our long-term experience provides a sensible framework for approaching each project with an open mind and fresh eyes to leverage the uniqueness of people, place, and program.
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Our work with endangered cultures and ecologies has been the medium for developing insights and practice protocols about the value and purpose of conservation, restoration, sustainability, and mediation.
We believe that it is possible to create an architecture that is both practical and poetic within any parameters or constraints. We believe the spaces, places, and forms we create have the potential of being inspiring and familiar. We have learned much from our client-collaborators. Indigenous Communities have taught us how to listen with all of our senses, to the power of places and people. Buddhist Communities have taught us how to see with fresh eyes and an open mind. Artists have taught us how to rely simultaneously on intelligence and intuition. Civic Leaders have taught us how to have a long-term vision in a short cycle world. Marginalized Ecologies have taught the basis for reviving and sustaining life in its most complex networks. Lives lived in local places have taught us where our humanity begins, and, children and students have often reminded us of the relationship between play and creativity.
Our approach is to know the place, the people, the resources, and then the architecture emerges. Life gives Form to Architecture.