FIRM BIO

Garrison Architects was founded by James Garrison in 1991 and is located in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Since its inception, the firm has risen to the forefront of modular building and sustainability innovation. Working across a diverse range of project types, from private residential to large scale public work, Garrison Architects pairs a research-driven approach to design with highly refined modernist aesthetics. The firm collaborates with designers, engineers, and manufacturers to produce architecture that responds to economic, cultural, technical, and environmental challenges.

OUR MISSION

We feel that well designed environments support social cohesion, balance human activity with nature, and intensify our experience of the world around us. Founded on the modernist legacy of design clarity and technical innovation, our work seeks to take advantage of new materials and evolving technologies to meet the challenges of today, including global warming, scarce resources, and rapid development.

Our approach is pragmatic. We work with the best means available to overcome the constraints of each project. Far from being a limitation, these constraints ground our work in real needs and spur research into innovative building techniques. Collaboration plays a fundamental role in this research. Within our walls, talented professionals and staff combine skills and experience to envision and produce sophisticated architecture. Beyond, we work closely with the world’s most accomplished engineers, artists, planners, technicians and manufacturers to build projects as varied as hurricane resilient beach structures and historic urban plazas.

Whether serving public or private clients, we design with an awareness of greater demands. Our goal is to create architecture that balances competing cultural and environmental forces, such as globalization and local tradition, ecological harmony and land development, and affordability and demand. Since 1991, Garrison Architects has pursued modular construction to solve the problems of sustainability, affordability and rapid growth. Its strengths are inherent material efficiency, economy of scale and built-in quality control. In our hands it has proved a powerful method for making humane, technologically advanced buildings that transcend mere shelter, on the one hand, and pure form or style on the other.