A design practicecommittedto producingspaces thatenhance lives.
A design practicecommitted to producingspaces that enhance lives.
Founded in 2003 by Charlie Lazor, Lazor/Office is a dynamic design practice committed to producing spaces that enhance our lives. We place primacy on place-making and developing sensitive, integrated responses to the sites we work on. The synthesis of form, material, and site is the constant focus of our endeavors, from research-driven investigations to realized projects. Interdisciplinary in nature, Lazor/Office has resisted becoming specialized in any particular aspect of design. The office handles a range of residential, commercial, and theoretical projects, with a scope that varies from furniture to architecture to building systems.
We seek design directives from bold clients and beautiful landscapes. Collaboration is essential to our relationships. Together we focus our experience, expertise and imaginations to achieve projects that surprise and delight.
We are dreamers and pragmatists, idealists and realists, thinkers and doers, makers and believers. These traits are essential to the design of architecture.
We like constraints and we like freedom. Our work relies on space to expand ideas and reasons to contract them.
We listen. We want to make spaces that enhance our ability to work, learn, and live together. Clients are part of our team.
By turning over rocks and suspending assumptions, together we start a dialogue. From dialogue emerges a way of doing. A way of being. A way forward.
We develop spaces, relationships, adjacencies, orientations, openings, material moments. We put ideas to purpose.
We seek logic: the rules that order space, site, climate, zoning code, building code, energy code, culture, history, imagery, proportion, budget, beauty and delight.
Each project has its own logic and we have to discover it. We have to distill it to something elegantly simple.
We sketch. We make diagrams. We make physical models and digital models. We click with a mouse and draw with a pencil.
We study all this; we iterate. We discover things. We share our discoveries with you, talk about it together, and try again.
We love the sky and trees, we love water. We prefer to be outside. We love to hear birds and feel the breeze. We love light.
We love stone and steel and wood. Dead flat steel, wavy steel, perforated steel. Smooth concrete, impressed concrete.
We love glass. A material that you can see through? Think about it!
We like buildings that are quiet, silent even. Buildings that do not announce themselves but rather reveal themselves slowly over time.
We believe architecture is felt more than it is seen. We believe buildings should frame nature, the world outside, and help us see it in a way that we didn't before.
We love what we do and we hope you do too.
Founder, Principal
Charlie Lazor
‘Charlie Lazor is also a co-founder of Blu Dot furniture and founder of the FlatPak House system.’
Education
Yale School of Architecture
Lazor/Office has completed work across the United States and Canada, primarily on the East and West Coasts and the Upper Midwest. The practice pursues a diverse array of programs and building types, investigating design as a process of making synthesized with site, program and place. The office design philosophy places primacy on “place-making” or developing a sensitive, integrated architectural response to the design challenges we are given. Lazor/Office was selected for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Triennial in 2006 and Charlie was a finalist for RISD’s Athena Award for emerging designers in 2005. The work of Lazor/Office has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Building Museum; Walker Art Center; Vancouver Art Gallery; and Yale School of Architecture.
Charlie is actively involved in academia, teaching and lecturing at the local and international level. He is Professor in Practice of Architecture and former Cass Gilbert Chair at the University of Minnesota College of Design. In dialogue with his practice, his studios engage manufactured building systems. Charlie has also taught at the University of Michigan as the Max Fish Visiting Chair and at the University of Arizona. He has been an invited juror at schools including Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California at Berkeley, and lectured extensively on the firm’s work at institutions including Harvard, Yale and RISD.
The work of Lazor/Office has been published in Dwell, The New York Times, Newsweek, and Time as well as in books published by Taschen, Rizzoli, DAAD, and Phaidon. Lazor/Office was chosen for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Triennial in 2006, and Charlie was a finalist for RISD’s Athena Award for emerging designers in 2005. The firm’s work has been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Building Museum; Walker Art Center; Vancouver Art Gallery; and Yale School of Architecture.
Charlie spends his free time fly fishing, playing ice hockey, and working on vintage motorcycles.
