At its core, National Sawdust is a retooling of the 18th century chamber hall model as an incubator for new music. The design is characterized by the insertion of a highly articulated crystalline form into the rough brick envelope of a former sawdust factory. This form is comprised of an acoustically transparent but visually translucent skin, which allows sound to travel through it freely. Creating a seamless, wrap-around enclosure for a wide repertoire of performances, the skin masks the variable sound absorbing, diffusing, and reflecting surfaces, as well as the state-of-the-art performance, recording, broadcast, and box-in-box isolation systems that allow the eponymous nonprofit to achieve its mission: to support new musicians, artists, and composers on their way to viable and sustainable careers.

Design: BUREAU V
Client: National Sawdust
Program: Concert Hall
Construction: Adaptive Reuse
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Active: 2008-2015

architectural photography by Floto + Warner
performance photography by David Andrako

This project is a multi-family mixed-use building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The 4 story building houses a 30ft tall commercial ground level with a mezzanine that spans the entire 25’x100’ site and three levels of floor-through condominium units above. Private terraces, a communal roof garden, and a façade comprised of diagonally oriented aluminum composite metal panels convene to create a unique visual identity for the building.

Design: BUREAU V
Client: Dankyle Realty IV
Program: Mixed-Use Commercial/Residential
Construction: New Building
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Active: 2015-2019

The MINI LIVING Urban Cabin, a collaboration with MINI LIVING and Bureau V, operates as a starter kit for the contemporary immigrant and as an absurdist protest against the current America political climate on immigration. Using humor as its primary method, the project seeks to undermine aggression and to provide at least some respite from the trauma of relocation.

Photography by Frank Ouderman, Lee Tuckett Photography, and Bureau V.

Design: BUREAU V in collarboration with MINI Living
Client: MINI / BMW Group
Program: Single Occupant Living Unit
Construction: Recycled Plywood, Acrylic and ACM Panels
Location: Brooklyn, NY

Led by James Beard Award-winning chef Patrick Connolly, Rider is a study in contrasts, occupying two levels within the nonprofit music venue National Sawdust.

Design: BUREAU V
Client: Patrick Connolly
Program: Restaurant
Construction: Adaptive Reuse
Location: Brooklyn, NY

Longtime collaborator Mary Ping of Slow and Steady Wins the Race (SSWTR) and Bureau V joined forces for the 5th time to create a workspace / exhibition platform for SSWTR’s presentation of the manufacturing and design of their Metamorphosis collection. It was shown at ‘Faisons de l’inconnu un allié' at the Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris, 2016.

Design: BUREAU V in collaboration with SSWTR
Client: SSWTR / Mary Ping
Program: Exhibition Design
Construction: Wood and Metal
Location: Paris, France

A pair of musicians, frequent collaborators and performers at National Sawdust, asked Bureau V to design a new music room for their Harlem residence. This room was to double as a performance space that opens onto a sitting room for private salon-style gatherings. Its dual role as creative space and impromptu stage required that it perform acoustically while providing a visually arresting backdrop for both performer/practitioner and audience.

Design: BUREAU V
Client: Private
Program: Practice Room for Professional Musicians
Construction: Interior Renovation
Location: Harlem, NY

In tandem with the studio’s architectural work, Bureau V produces original drawing compositions for many of our project. This series of drawings is an ongoing experiment, seeking to find new values for the architectural deliverable outside the functions of presentation and construction. Each drawing is an original document created through processes such as computer-generated graphics, hand drawing, applique, paint, and collage.

Design: BUREAU V
Construction: Mixed-Media Drawings

Enter the Dragon consists of a black marble tetrahedral shape wrapped in warm white neon. The project operates as a collage of formal and material tropes, as classic signifiers of wealth and power (the chandelier, the pyramid, and figured marble) are recontextualized, defaced, and framed by the callow squiggles of a pop-commercial material, neon.

Design: BUREAU V
Client: National Sawdust
Program: Light fixture for Performance Hall Stairwell
Construction: Nero Marquina marble, neon, metal
Location: Brooklyn, NY

Stoffwechselmode is a menswear capsule collection based loosely on 19th century German Architect Gottfried Semper’s Stoffwechseltheorie, which traces how form lingers after materials change over time. The collection shifts the materials of utility-driven sportswear (like the bicycle bib shorts and fishing waders) to migrate residual forms from the utility of sport into a more formal and sculptural setting.

Design: BUREAU V
Client: BYCO
Item: Menswear

Bureau V collaborated with the conceptual fashion label Slow and Steady Wins the Race (SSWTR) to present a series of three pop-up installations for New York Fashion Week. Bureau V designed and constructed all of the installations, often on a schedule of only a few weeks. Concepts have ranged from still life, to balloon-framing, to the department store. Projects received support from Saatchi & Saatchi and the Art Production Fund.

Design: BUREAU V
Client: Slow and Steady Wins the Race / Mary Ping
Program: Exhibition and live workspace
Construction: Wood
Location: Paris, France

Bureau V collaborated with Mary Ping of Slow and Steady Wins the Race to create an expandable table prototype that posits a future of dining. The piece is now on view at the Cooper Hewitt alongside the tablewares created by Joe Doucet, included in the show “Tablescapes: Designs for Dining”, on view now through April 14, 2019.

Design: BUREAU V
Client: Slow and Steady Wins the Race / Mary Ping
Program: Dining Futures
Construction: Recycled cartons, Metal
Location: Cooper Hewitt Museum, NY

In collaboration with Lars Jan of Early Morning Opera, Bureau V was tasked with creating a platform/installation for a performance by Early Morning Opera. The piece was originally intended for presentation in the lower level space and outdoor plaza at the Whitney Museum in tandem with their retrospective on Buckminster Fuller.

Design: BUREAU V
Client: Early Morning Opera for The Whitney Museum
Program: Performance platform
Construction: Unrealized
Location: New York, NY

The Montello Foundation is a residency program for contemporary artists in the desert of northeast Nevada. The program offers each artist the privilege of solitary residence in the barren desert landscape for a brief period to reflect on the natural surroundings and to create new work in this exceptional environment. The project is a small off the grid complex that provides simultaneous immersion in and protection from the extreme landscape. Two simple structures, made of precast concrete and corrugated aluminum siding, house living quarters and a work studio and are connected at the roof by a screened canopy that houses solar panels and a water catchment system and at the ground by and reclaimed timber deck.

Design: BUREAU V
Client: Montello Foundation
Program: Studio and Living Quarters for Artists Residency
Construction: Unrealized
Location: Nevada

Designed in collaboration with artist Tyler Coburn, Ergonomic Futures is a multi-part project that addresses contemporary “fitness” and normative bodies through the lens of speculative evolution. The project takes the form of a series of sculptural seating elements, the first was on view at the Gwangju Biennale 2016. The second was shown at the Fondation Galeries Lafayette.

Design: BUREAU V
Client: Tyler Coburn
Program: Art Installation
Construction: Wood by Yong Chul Kim
Location: Cooper Hewitt Museum, NY

photography courtesy of Tyler Coburn

Trillion Dollar Mile is a renovation of an existing commercial building along a major thoroughfare in New Jersey. The project takes up the contextual typology of the drive-by commercial facade as its point of departure. Operating as a series of chromatically shifting ribs arrayed along the surface of the existing masonry structure, the project produces a facade as volume, as it reconstructs and thickens the building’s original flatness.

Design: BUREAU V
Client: ESL 200 LLC
Program: Commercial Facade Renovation
Construction: ACM Panels
Location: Englewood Cliffs, NJ