BAD is a creative practice.

We think of our projects as 'irreal' stage sets. Although they are of the 'real', immediate and material world; and are implicated in its circumstances, codes and conventions they are simultaneously estranged from it. It bears pointing out that if all the world's a stage not every stage is equal. Sometimes a stage is a world in and of itself - it is not just an 'inside' but it has an 'outside' too. In his writings on London practice 6a architects, critic Irénée Scalbert states that architecture "does not represent situations, but it stages them" and that "(O)n rare occasions, it is itself a performance." We could not agree more.

Typically our stage sets are one of either two kinds of room - exterior (usually urban, where the sky is a ceiling and slightly exaggerated frames define the beat and pulse of surfaces and edges) or interior (usually involving the sleeving, or skirting, of existing spaces, with very little or no connection to the outside world - where subdued wall surfaces perform attenuated graphic acts, or turbulent ones ruffle existing perimeters). Alternatively they are autonomous objects (usually characterized by compact, prismatic profiles or elephantine bulk) that set up passive/aggressive relationships with their surroundings. The inspiration for stage set moods and atmospheres is Mies van der Rohe's body of work - particularly the early phase when Mies's work was caught between times and sensibilities.

As such our stage sets operate like punctuation in urban and ex-urban landscapes whose coherence and communicative capacities are, at best, Delphic. In this sense they do not clarify anything. Instead they might briefly change a situation, like a comma - or a hyphen - does to a sentence. Depending on the situation the stage sets act like blank screen ellipses, shadowy framed caesuras or agitated prismatic figures on a fuzzy horizon. Because no thing is inherently meaningful and no thing transmits anything immutably significant our interest in punctuation is both charged and inflected by having next to nothing left to say, or to do, after Mies's theaters of almost, or next to, nothing.

This minute space is an interesting one to work in. And in it we chase an Architecture that is neither parlante nor participante but to both somehow tangentially connected.

That is an architecture after gesture, whose analogs might include: . , ! : … - ( ) ;