GRAFT

GRAFT is among the most innovative laboratories of contemporary architecture. With offices in Berlin, Los Angeles and Beijing, it seems only natural to present the enormous potential of this community of architects and designers to a wider audience in Berlin and beyond. Like no other architectural firm, GRAFT attempts to integrate the ambiguous, the inconsistent, and the apparently irreconcilable in their thinking, Conflating opposites generates a creative mix which, in turn, leads to unusual solutions. This approach requires a consistently open mind that admits, at least to begin with, any idea, regardless of how bizarre or incongruous it may seem. The concept of “grafting”, of transplanting bits from different species as it is regularly practiced in the wine and fruit-growing industries, lends itself to a kind of architecture which targets the hybrid as its perpetual, natural principle. It resists changes in fashion and style while favoring collective design practices. Bringing together wildly differing sources, GRAFT develops architectural “bastards” that pleasantly eschew the fanciful and overbred. Every client, every site has its own stories and visions. For GRAFT, stories form the groundwork of their open-minded, associative, and site-specific method. To them it is more important to tell a story than to comply with convention.