Located on the Pacific coast of Guatemala near the small city of San Jose, this beach house engages with its ocean-side site and the local climate. The house uses traditional materials of the region in a contemporary manner and with ecologically sensitive goals. Wooden screens protect outdoor rooms and the mass of the house from summer solar gain, while opening up spaces to views and the prevailing winds. Through a series of passive design techniques and the house’s organization, the building responds to its particular climate in order to increase the comfort of its residents while reducing its energy consumption. Only sleeping rooms will have air conditioning, the rest of the house will be naturally ventilated. Other environmentally sensitive considerations have been made, including the use of wooden doors that are recycled from old villas in the region. The contemporary forms of the house are rooted in analysis of the site views, patterns of light and wind, and connections between enclosed and outdoor spaces. Rooms open to central courtyard spaces as well as the verandahs for increased light and ventilation. The house cascades towards the beach through a series of elements, including a lap pool, cabana, and children’s pool.

over,under was commissioned to design the interiors and prepare the graphic identity for this new business, a dog spa, located along Washington Street in Boston’s South End. The space and identity package were conceived in unison with one another, resulting in a seamless sense of space, the logo, and all the graphic material for the company. The storefront opens to Washington Street with a retail space, waiting area, and reception desk, all of which use a subtle material palette and restrained but playful forms. Deeper into the building, the spa includes washing stations and other facilities for dog owners to pamper their pets. The project is being designed and built in collaboration with Studio F•KIA, and its construction was completed in April 2009.

The architectural and urban design guidelines for the International Design Zone Qatar were prepared in conjunction with Virginia Commonwealth University and Carnegie Mellon University. The work produced includes site analysis, program analysis, and design guidelines that are intended to complement the initial studies for the Design Zone idea itself. This new initiative of the Qatar Foundation aims to foster the creative industries in the nation. The completed project document provides a structure for translating the original Design Zone concepts into physical form. It does so in a way that permits a number of possible outcomes, while remaining true to the Design Zone mission.

Duratherm commissioned over,under to design its promotional brochure. The company wished to target architects who specify its products. The resulting design foregrounds the powerful images of Duratherm’s windows being used in exceptional contemporary works of architecture. These images are complemented by quotations drawn from modernist masters, placing the contemporary projects in the context of a rarified realm of design thinkers such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Buckminster Fuller, Louis Kahn, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Eliel Saarinen. The simple play of deeply meaningful quotations, detailed serif typefaces, and strong images gives a greater sense of the importance of details, craft, and materials. In turn, these values reinforce the qualities of Duratherm’s products. The piece uses custom graphic icons created by over,under.

The site of this hotel is situated along the Boulevard de las Fuerzas Armadas in Tegucigalpa, a roadway that is one of the major connections between the country’s northwest and southeast regions. The hotel overlooks the city’s largest shopping center, providing services, restaurants, entertainment, and other amenities to its guests. The building is situated as far as possible from the boulevard. This approach leaves an area for a porte-cochère and a pedestrian link from a nearby transit stop to the lobby. The hotel has ninety-six rooms on eight upper floors. The ground level houses the lobby, two business centers, a small retail area, a breakfast lounge, and a pool. The hotel tower sits on two levels of parking below ground. Its volume is extremely simple, with three key sculptural elements: the entrance canopy, the circulation tower, and the hotel’s deep-set façade. Windows are recessed to create strong shadow lines and protect against the region’s intense light. The wall’s thickness absorbs the eighty-centimeter structural columns and provides areas for small built-in workstations. Its thickness also leaves the room’s interior precisely rectangular, a spatially pure volume. Construction will be completed in the fall of 2009.

The exhibition Think Swim, Think Swiss: Bringing Swiss-Style Swimming to the Charles River is a joint effort of the Consulate of Switzerland/swissnex Boston and the Charles River Conservancy. The exhibition brings attention to the potential for urban river swimming that exists in the Charles River today. In collaboration with F•KIA, over,under developed this temporary, nomadic exhibition along the Charles River. A series of metal fabricated crosses serve as view ports, each of which illustrates a Swiss river bath. Information is provided for each building, and the installation allows visitors to learn about the Swiss tradition as well as visualize how such activities would appear on the banks of the Charles River. The installation traveled to Chicago.

Perched atop a hillside in northern Lebanon, this house provides a compound for an extended family. The site contains the stone ruins of a vernacular structure, which have been incorporated into the configuration of the new house. The stone walls form two sides of a garden courtyard, roughly square in plan. The new house provides a counterpoint to this garden void, with a cubic volume partially carved into the hillside. The house is accessed on the lower level from a parking shelter, through a carved ravine, to a courtyard, where the full vertical organization of the house is revealed. This sequence of arrival passes by a studio space for the owner. Windows, balconies, and screened openings are set deep into the exterior skin to provide an animated surface treatment that plays with the strong light of the Mediterranean region. A pool slips into the main mass on the western corner, with distant views of the valley and sea below.

This book combines the research and work of two directed studios, one at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, the other at the Ecole Politechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Led by the Swiss architect Ines Lamuniere, both studios explored the relationships between the natural and built environments by developing designs for large-scale buildings in Manhattan. The publication contains essays by the authors and prominent architects, including Adam Yarinsky, Nina Rappaport, Leslie Gill, and Billie Tsien. Eight design proposals by students from Lausanne and Cambridge are presented to showcase a selection of the research work on the city of New York. over,under designed the book and edited its content.

over,under’s first book for Rizzoli Publications is Tiny Houses, by Mimi Zeiger. This dimensionally small book is about tiny homes where people challenge themselves to live "greener" lives. Two key aspects hold the content of the book: first, a horizontal line from which all design elements begin, and second, a method of identifying the relative size of each environment. Several of the house plans were playfully deployed as patterns that define key moments in the book.

This proposal is conceived to be an elegant, complementary extension of the existing World Trade Organization structure with an advanced agenda for sustainability. In deference to the massing of the original, the new volume aligns carefully at an urban scale, but withdraws slightly and touches the WTO only at the midpoint of the block. The resulting plan is E-shaped, with a longer middle leg to meet up with the central circulatory axis of the WTO. The new façade has a solid precast textured exterior, where large windows are set deeply into the mass of the building. The precast structure forms an open grid in which the position of these windows varies depending on their location, views, and solar orientation. On the east face, where the view is the most impressive (looking towards Lake Geneva, the Alps, and Mont Blanc), the windows are playfully distributed, with deep and flush-set panels of glass creating dynamic and distorted reflections of the landscape.

This exhibition was held in the pinkcomma gallery to display the work of ten emerging design firms who collaborated on the installation "Parti Wall, Hanging Green" for the national convention of the American Institute of Architects. The Young Architects Boston Group is an organization of firms dedicated to contemporary design while engaging in the complex culture of metropolitan Boston. Floating exhibition panels displayed the design work of the ten firms, complementing the collective installation presented outside. Rather than clustering images by firm, over,under designed the exhibition with a neutral organizational pattern. Panels were hung in roughly chronological order and in columns by project. Each firm typically had four projects, with one large image approximating the date the firm began. Much like with the green wall outside, the work inside was presented anonymously. Project descriptions and attributions were hidden from first view. Only a deeper look revealed the individual agendas and authorship, through the lifting of a felt panel concealing project information and credits.

As part of the 2008 national convention of the American Institute of Architects, Susan Harnett of the Boston Society of Architects conceived of an exhibition that would display the work of local up-and-coming firms. The goal was to highlight the vital creative economy of Boston and dispel the perception that Boston is a place where clients shopped for architects who could produce respectable red brick buildings. A generous grant from the LEF Foundation provided funding for the collective project, run by the ten participating firms. The resulting installation "Parti Wall, Hanging Green" was a temporary, five-story-tall prototype intended to transform a blank brick wall into a lush, green environment. The team aimed to generate awareness for underutilized sites in Boston and to offer design solutions that apply sustainable principles for improving public space and creating healthy neighborhoods in the city. The structure, which was on view for two months, included panels of Sedum suspended by metal cables to form an overall pattern. Its installation involved nearly fifty volunteers and participants, forming a design community where students from various schools and designers worked side-by-side. The Young Architects Boston Group includes: Ground; Howeler + Yoon Architecture; LinOldhamOffice; Merge Architects; MOS; over,under; SsD; Studio Luz Architects; UNI; and Utile.

Commissioned to overhaul Wentworth’s admissions material, over,under was charged with remaking the institute’s image. The resulting graphics program abstracts Wentworth’s existing colors and crest to form a recognizable, yet fresher and bolder identity. Production has included over fifteen separate pieces, ranging from posters, invitations, bookmarks, and banners to departmental brochures, applications forms, and general profile books. The project also involved providing photography services, editorial content development, and printing oversight. During the campaign's first year, submitted applications rose 50 percent. The subsequent year, they rose an additional 19 percent.

This house is one of three located in a ten-acre family compound north of Cairo in an area known as Al-Thawra al-Khadra, or “The Green Revolution.” The district is formed from reclaimed desert land near the Sixth of October City. Commissioned by an Egyptian living in London, the house is to be built as a retreat within a large olive grove. It surrounds two formal courtyards that are carved from the larger masonry block. When viewed from the surrounding olive grove, the building appears as a solid, monolithic form, one that complements the language of the arid local landscape. A scrim with greenery wraps portions of the exterior wall. This screen folds inward at the main entrance and forms the boundaries of the entrance courtyard. The rooms ringing this outdoor space will benefit from the lushness of the screened light provided by this green surface.

over,under’s relationship with Rockport Publishers began in 2003 with Mark Pasnik co-authoring two books, Elements and Materials as part of the Architecture in Detail series. This series has sold over 30,000 copies worldwide and has been published in several languages. More recently, over,under has developed and designed a new series for the press—Contemporary Design in Detail. The first two books in this series, Sustainable Environments and Small Environments, were completed in the spring of 2007. Chris Grimley has also co-authored and designed Color Space Style, a guidebook to interior design that was published in the fall of 2007.

Commissioned and published by ArchitectureBoston, this proposal for rethinking Boston City Hall provides a study to counteract the city leadership’s interest in moving and abandoning the existing seat of government. The design creates vibrant counterpoints of light and liveliness to City Hall’s monumental framework. It proposes a series of tactical modifications to the building’s lowest and most public levels: clarifying way-finding; improving views, light, and sustainability; occupying abandoned spaces; and increasing the building’s openness to the city. A new canopy structure reshapes the building’s arrival sequence from the public plaza and Congress Street. Inside, the study suggests enclosing the central courtyard to improve the building’s sustainable performance. This change also permits exposing the concrete trusses of the public-services concourse below. Daylight from the atrium would stream downward into what is presently a dark hall. Light globes, colorful wall panels, and illuminated information screens would create an animated atmosphere.

This series of posters were developed and produced based upon an excerpt first designed for the book Color Space Style by Chris Grimley and Mimi Love. The larger of the series showcases significant works of modern furniture design. Following that, a series of smaller studies are being produced that look at a single piece of furniture set against a geometric background. The influence of Swiss poster design, the use of Helvetica, and the minimal graphic treatment is a subtle nod to our 'neutral' roots. The poster is available for sale here.

Since its inception, etcetera media has been branded, photographed and marketed by over,under. In addition to work on etcetera's website, over,under have developed a custom design solution for their webstore, and colloaborated with owner Kelly Smith to design, build and intall their booth for the New York International Gift Fair. Photography for the Stockholm bag was rencently featured in Metropolis magazine.

Directed by Mark Pasnik and Chris Grimley, pinkcomma exists outside Boston’s power circles, yet strives to make design more pivotal in the city’s political discourse. The gallery’s role is activist in nature, promoting works that may be at times politically unpalatable or financially untenable, unpopular or unacknowledged. It has hosted the Rethinking City Hall exhibit, the inaugural event for Design Nearby (a showcase for local designers), and Parti Wall, Hanging Green (an exhibition and installation of ten emerging design firms in Boston). The gallery has been reviewed in the Boston Globe, Boston Phoenix, The Architect, Architectural Record, Art New England, and Volume.

This design for a cat habitat was prepared pro bono for the Animal Rescue League of Boston and sold as part of a fundraising event. Conceived as a series of spaces for sitting, playing and catnapping, it is formed of a wood volume lined with a series of iridescent laminate interiors. Felt inserts by etcetera media line both the seat and the bed.

In his role as a faculty member at Wentworth Institute, over,under principal Mark Pasnik has been collaborating with two other faculty on a project to restore environmental health and civic life to an urban block known as Ujamaa Square in Treme. The entire neighborhood was damaged by both the storm itself and contaminants deposited in the soil by the floodwaters. This project involves the design and construction of a remediation landscape and renovations to a building to house the environmental center. The educational garden, which students have constructed, doubles as a small civic park. This outdoor environment will provide places to observe the various remediation methods available to residents. The project has been awarded a 2006 Boston Society of Architects Research Grant.

In addition to working on printed material for the new School of Architecture at Northeastern University—which has encompassed lecture posters, brochures, and promotional material—over,under, working together with the Educational Technology group at Northeastern, developed a new website for the School of Architecture. The site utilizes a custom Content Management System and CSS to form both the content and the navigation tools. Taking the metaphor of a broadsheet, information is pulled to the front page of the site as necessary and is refreshed frequently in order to keep the site current. Links are repeated on each page of the site, in a belief that redundancy in interface development allows for custom navigation solutions on the user end. over,under also designed an admissions brochure and lecture posters for the School of Architecture, re-branding the image of the program in relation to the website. Northeastern Architecture

This proposal investigates the use of microturbines to convert Philadelphia’s existing stormwater sewer system into an energy source that will power new activities within the city’s urban voids. To complement the underground turbines, the project introduces over-scaled tulip-like structures within the voids. These collect water and harness the wind for ecological purposes. They demonstrate a strategy for implementing an endless variety of locally scaled civic or community programs powered and encouraged by the turbines and the invisible aquatic infrastructure.