Maxi Spina and Jia Gu of Spinagu

For this week's Studio Snapshot, we talk with Spinagu's principals Maxi Spina and Jia Gu. They walk us through their studio's history, trajectory and explain how all the various avenues of disciplinary exploration find their ways into their work. From chess sets and exhibitions to dwellings and faux views, their work flows between mediums and scales seamlessly. 

Maxi Spina is the co-founder of Spinagu. He is currently Design Faculty and Applied Studies Faculty at SCI-Arc. He was previously the Maybeck Fellow at UC Berkeley, Lecturer at CCA and Associate Professor at Woodbury. His work has been featured in exhibitions at A+D Museum, Jai & Jai, and Wuho Gallery. He received his M.Arch from Princeton University and a B.Arch from National University of Rosario, Argentina. He is the Design Director of Spinagu.

Jia Gu is a designer and educator with a special interest in critical and conceptual practices in art and architecture. She holds a B.A in Visual Arts with Honors from UCSD and a Master of Architecture with Honors from UCLA. Previous to founding Spinagu, Jia has worked and collaborated with international studios including raumlaborberlin, Something Fantastic, Kyong Park, Valentina Karga, Pieterjan Gandry and Rosario Talevi. Her work has taken her to Berlin, Shanghai, Anyang, Prague, Torino, and Barcelona. In 2015, she was appointed Director of Materials & Applications, and Associate Director of UCLA A.UD Summer Programs. She is currently teaching Design Studio at USC, History/Theory at SCI-Arc and pursuing a PhD in Architecture at UCLA. She is the Creative Director of Spinagu.

Where and When did your studio start?

Maxi: It started in Los Angeles; we started entertaining the idea sometime in 2014 after our first collaboration, and the decision was formalized by early 2016. 

How did you come up with your name and company ethos?

Jia: We compounded our last names — borrowing from well-known naming conventions of professional offices (take the last names of the principals) but turning it into a one-name author, which it functionally becomes. Our legal name is Eponymous Office, LLC. 

How many people work at the company?

It will depend on the project. Our team has consisted of twenty people, it has also consisted of two. 

What made you decide to start an office?

Maxi: That was my interest since I started studying architecture in Argentina. To be honest I never gave another option much thought. We’ve spent time working in various offices. When I first arrive to the United States, I worked with Neil Denari and Daniel Libeskind on a number of projects. Jia worked with Raumlabor Berlin and Something Fantastic. These were great experiences; we learnt a lot and always like to collaborate with other creative people. But we ultimately wanted to confront our ideas through an independent platform. 

How did you meet?

Maxi: We met in Los Angeles through the community of people that split their time between teaching and practicing. I had launched my solo practice (Maxi Spina Architects) in 2007, but was looking for a more collective endeavor; a collaboration in which we can have common ideas and interests but also where our individual backgrounds begin to intersect in productive and unexpected ways. 

Jia: We are an architecture couple in the most traditional sense of the word. 

What would you want your firm to be known for?

We’re very interested in working more in exhibition design, because there are so many interesting spatial, material and organizational questions that come up when you begin to consider how work — artistic or otherwise — is put on display. 

We are an architecture couple in the most traditional sense of the word

What was the first year like? 

Insane. The first year at Spinagu found us doing a number of exhibition projects, objects and temporary installations –a series of objects for “The Secret Life of Buildings” at UT Austin; a third instantiation of our chess project for a new issue of SCI-Arc’s Sessions; an exhibition display system for CityLab x 10 exhibition at A+D; installations at One Night Stand and the SCI-Arc gallery; and a temporary pavilion for The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time launch event at Grand Park. We decided that rather than churn out work in an intense manner, we should also slow it down, to rethink how to structure our practice and our work, and to decide what we want to engage with. We wanted to avoid the trap of producing for productivity’s sake. 

What were the biggest obstacles along the way?

Jia: I wouldn’t call them obstacles, but perhaps tensions or frictions in working together that was very revealing of the different ways we were both trained as designers but also shaped as people. Maxi trained first in a very technical school for architecture in Rosario, where the education of an architect matches more closely the professional demands of an office— and then he spent some time in the east coast in graduate school in Princeton where the work was much more discursive. I grew up in Los Angeles and spent the first decade of my career studying and working in the art world and in museums. So we were arriving to this practice with very different experiences. 

How does academia work its way into your work?

We are both committed to teaching and researching, and we were both fortunate enough to attend two schools that prioritized critical discourse alongside professional practice. Academia becomes a place where we can engage and extend certain ideas we have about architectural culture, history, display, representation, technology, etc. and to pose some of the important cultural and political questions that interest us. Running your own practice allows you to work on these ideas differently, to test them again other kinds of industries and operators. We work back and forth. There is information loss on either side but we could never give up either. 

What are you currently working on?

We have a few projects: a small book on model documentation in architecture, a mid-rise housing project, we just finished a family house in Argentina, and Jia is working on her dissertation on postwar use of scientific models in architecture. 

What is the main thesis of your office?

I don’t know if we have a single thesis — I think that model of the “magnum opus” or the singular author with a singular project doesn’t exist anymore for our generation of designers. Every office will have many simultaneous modes of thinking and working, and if it appears that any office has a singular body of work, it will only in large part be due to really bad historiography or a really monotonous view of design. 

But, I do think we have one central question that has driven our work, which is the question about being a small office. What does it mean to be a small architecture practice today, and can we teach and practice meaningfully in an era when the distinction between the architect, the contractor, and the corporation is increasingly blurred? Without harking to an overly romantic notion of “the architect as genius” model, we are certain there are more ways to develop agency for architects to contribute to and participate in the world today and that these avenues are relatively underdeveloped and unexplored. The dominant two models for a built architecture to exist in the world today is the patron model or the corporate model, and we need to rethink the design of these conditions as intensely as we consider the conditions of design. 

Where do you see the office in 5 years? In 10 years?

We hope to work more with institutions and civic spaces, where you can produce architecture with a kind of “publicness” in mind. We are also very interested in expanding our work to include exhibition design and scenography, two areas in which design has the remarkable agility — in fortifying the relationship between an object and its environment, in organizing an audience’s perceptions and observations, and in producing spatial and visual meaning within acts of display. And of course, we will never say no to a building commission.