The JA Architecture Studio team at their Toronto office (Nima Javidi and Behnaz Assadi standing and sitting on the left). Image courtesy of JA.

For our latest Studio Snapshot conversation, Archinect had the pleasure of chatting with Nima Javidi and Behnaz Assadi, founding partners of Toronto-based JA Architecture Studio. Being an architect and a landscape designer, respectively, Javidi and Assadi contribute their unique perspectives to tackle an array of typologies — recently earning them also, among other awards, a coveted Emerging Voices distinction from The Architectural League of New York.

Their interview responses elaborate on the team's search for a new mode of practice, the relationship of their architecture to the city, and aspirations for future commissions. 

Can you tell us how JA Architecture Studio was founded?

JA was established in 2010, and we are categorically part of the post-2008 offices — meaning that we studied during the period of optimism towards more agency for architecture within the spirit of globalism and through the revolutionary presence of the digital project to affect thinking, drawing, and modes of practice. But we practiced in the time that either or both of those ethe proved less true as it was initially characterized.

Behnaz was working for OMA, and I was working for local practices to get exposed to the city building in the local sense. So In our case, we were preparing ourselves for a medium mode of practice that has the openness of OMA but has a local understanding of the problem of the city. And we felt that there was a missing middle in the mode of practice, and the recession was the push we needed to move out of our critical positions to pursue that missing middle.

How many people are currently employed at the firm? How is your office structured?

We oscillate between 5 to 10 people. Right now, we are 7.

Would you like to scale up and grow your team? What do you consider the ideal size for your practice?

We like the idea of reaching 15 in a careful way, meaning that the projects that will accommodate the growth should not impose a linearity on our time and its allocation.

Describe your office culture. How do you nourish it?

We think our culture is defined by two things: form and time. Form is our disciplinary interest, and time is the resource of our practice. We are very careful with both. Our care about form is readable through our portfolio. Our care about time is less so, but it is essentially how we maintain a non-linear relationship between time and projects in our office.

[...] we felt that there was a missing middle in the mode of practice, and the recession was the push we needed to move out of our critical positions to pursue that missing middle.

The development of good architecture is dependent on a non-linear and rather chaotic process of testing many ideas and, in short, doing many things that no one has asked you to do. We never tried to put it in an exchange equation. We test many things, and we build many things that nobody has asked us to do.

The affordance came somewhere between the commitment and energy of our team, generosity of institutions like UofT and Cooper Union that indirectly helped us and sometimes clients through charm and seduction, and that is part of our trade history!

What have been the biggest hurdles starting and running your own practice?

Entering new territories of practice without changing how we operate.

We test many things, and we build many things that nobody has asked us to do.

What challenges have you faced during the past pandemic years? Are you sensing a return to ‘business as usual’?

We managed to keep the practice going at a slower pace perhaps but steadily with our staff working remotely and us working from the office. We are now running the practice at full capacity.

Describe your work. How do you define your own unique style and approach?

Our work is in finding unique geometric and spatial figures and setups for sites with generic urban qualities. The experience of being in the city and feeling a different response to a generic problem is one of the most exciting ways of experiencing architecture in the city, and of course, that is just the start, and the plot thickens when the question of tectonic, the vernacular modes of construction and…get tied to this. 

We are extremely inspired by Gehry’s early years. More on how he was both a normal practice engaged with vernacular tectonic and a radical one for the same reason and at the same time.

How do your individual backgrounds as architect and landscape designer inform the design process and approach to new assignments?

We swap roles, read and define the projects differently, sometimes from architecture to landscape and sometimes vice versa. We usually meet somewhere on the fuzzy threshold of where buildings meet the ground. Our site plans are the evidence of this struggle and overlay between patterns of use and patterns of ecology. Which one of the two motivates the other varies from one project to another.

Our work is in finding unique geometric and spatial figures and setups for sites with generic urban qualities.

Where do you see JA Architecture Studio in 5 years?

Hopefully, we will manage to extend our mode of practice from our current projects to ones with more civic and public presence and use.

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

We like those of our projects that their lives after occupancy become part of the experience of the city/neighborhood. And that is not just architecture — two of our projects have managed to become that kind of a place: our designed bakery called Forno Cultura and our artist residency/gallery called Underscore Project. One is a place of socializing with bread as an alibi, the other a low-key gathering around and for art.

If you could describe your work/practice in three words, what would they be?

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