Nancy Hou and Josh de Sousa Image © Hou de Sousa

After graduating architecture school, Nancy Hou and Josh de Sousa knew right away they wanted to start their own practice. After gaining experience by working for notable design offices, the two strived to create a practice which fed their appetite for creative freedom. Their attention to detail, and passion for building with a sense of purpose and camaraderie, has the firm quickly becoming a catalyst for designs that incite human interaction.

For this week's Studio Snapshot, Nancy and Josh talk about the joys of cultivating a creative environment, and how starting their practice twice lead to a deeper understanding of the work they wanted to produce. 

How many people are in your practice? 

For the first five years it was just the two of us, but we’ve recently brought in some folks to help out. The team includes four people and we’re at the cusp of expanding.

What was the motivation for starting your own firm?

As naïve and uninformed as we were upon entering architecture school, we did know that we wanted to start our own practice one day. While we enjoyed working at some fantastic offices along the way, these experiences never really satisfied the itch of seeing a project through from concept sketches to opening day, when stakes are high and your name is on the line. We would get attached to projects while working for other offices, but it was always somebody’s else’s baby in the end. 

What are the benefits of having your own practice? And staying small? 

A deep sense of purpose and camaraderie, and of course the freedom to obsess over details, propose a wildly speculative concept, build a mock-up, or even develop in-house projects. We love the job itself and running a practice is the most direct conduit. It’s a position we’re constantly grateful for, as we enjoy it so fully. 

Is scaling up a goal or would you like to maintain the size of your practice? 

We enjoy the energy, environment, and efficiency of a small group of people working together, but our experience with teaching larger groups of students has been so positive that our ambition has grown, and we’d like to expand the office to 15-20, allowing us to take on more projects and at larger scales.

What hurdles have you come across?

Every small office faces similar hurdles, but each also encounters unique challenges.

For us, it was that we essentially started our practice twice, in completely different places, and under completely different circumstances. Following our first design/build project, a restaurant in Quito, Ecuador called Dim Sum Bar, more work flowed in and we were off to a flying start. 

We hadn’t planned on living abroad for long, so when a few commissions came our way that were based in the US, we were excited to return to New York. Unfortunately, two of these projects stalled and we essentially had to start from scratch. We transitioned from a practice with a steady stream of design/build work to one that entered competitions, public art RFP’s, scrambled for renovations, and taught on the side.

We don’t know how the plot ends, but we’ve managed to get a foothold and find some success taking this route. The studio is in a good place and we’re looking forward to announcing a handful of new projects in the coming weeks.

Do you have a favorite project? Completed or in progress?

We like projects that are conceptually rich, but also manage to elegantly resolve many issues with simple and direct design solutions. This is a benchmark we strive for at the office, and unsurprisingly, we’ve faired best when our proposals have been easy to communicate and understand. 

We’ve had a succession of projects where the goal was to directly engage the public by providing a scaffold or flexible system which could be set in motion through human energy and imagination. These tactile, no-tech projects require physical presence and participation. This thread of thought began with “Raise/Raze” and “Sticks”, and these two design/builds have influenced and brought in new work along the way, including an addition that is underway at Socrates Sculpture Park dubbed “Sticks II”, and a public sculpture/pavilion in the West coast that will be announced soon. 

We’re also thrilled with the public’s positive response to “Prismatic”, a sculpture/pavilion that just opened in Washington DC as part of the Georgetown Glow Exhibition. 

And although unbuilt, “Cuneiformed” also remains a favorite of ours, as this proposal for Songdo, South Korea’s Museum of World Writing encapsulates a collection of ideas about modularity and space planning that were explored in conjunction with two in-house abstract projects called the “Porous Mass Series” and “Gesso on Basswood Series”. 

If you could describe your practice in two words what you would they be?

Adapt and embrace. We don’t have a fixed agenda, design philosophy, or modus operandi. But what is common, is that we always begin by trying to understand what is at the heart of a project. Our only litmus test for the potential of ideas is that everyone agrees it’s the best option and that they’re also excited about it.