The Office

!ndie architecture is a Denver based design and research group that takes on a variety of projects—from designing buildings to writing books to curating contemporary art exhibitions. As an alternative to mainstream, mass produced, and corporately funded architecture, the office embraces its small market status, is associated with collegiate backpack intellectualism, and consistently seeks new ways of disseminating architectural and urban ideas.

Paul Andersen, the director, has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Cornell University, and is a guest curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. He is a licensed architect (NCARB Cert., CA, CO, NY).

The Work

While the project types are varied, there are threads that connect them.

Conceptually, we maintain an ongoing interest in patterns—visual patterns, but also behavioral, structural, organizational and other types of patterns. Patterns have a unique capacity for integrating a wide range of materials, functions, forms, environmental systems, and even cultural trends in a coherent and technically precise project. They bridge worlds of knowledge and matter, art and science, and for us, research and practice.

Thematically, we have begun to propose alternative versions of suburban houses, neighborhoods, and lifestyles. Suburbia is almost universally condemned on one hand and, on the other, the dominant mode of urban growth worldwide. Because it is largely devoid of architectural and urban invention, we are guiding suburban design in new, often paradoxical, directions through academic research and an emerging series of projects in the Western US. Examples of these suburban visions combine contemporary architecture and hydrogen fuel distribution, advanced mass transit technology and manufactured housing, responsive facades and density studies, inflatable structures and home ownership trends, street patterns and water conservation.

Strategically, we engage architecture and other areas of our work from multiple points of view, sometimes injecting unrelated material into the work to help us do so. In a design project we link plant life, heating systems, and graffiti. In a book we examine the practices of Peruvian weavers along with the mathematics of crystal formations. In an exhibition, we introduce weight loss as an issue of contemporary art. We practice energy conservation in building construction while simultaneously extolling the benefits of energy expenditure in art.

We approach each project with a mix of curiosity, intellectualism, and experience that allows us to simultaneously expand the scope of things we do and sharpen our sense of how we do them.