Golden ratio

We highlight ten emerging Californian practices that are redrawing the borders of traditional architecture with their unique creative explorations

- ELLIE STATHAKI

MILLIØNS ‘

We find it impossible to imagine architecture apart from a kind of expansive, ongoing project of observation and investigation, as a way of continually understanding the world around us,’ say Zeina Koreitem and John May, founders of Milliøns, a small LA studio with an outsized vision for architecture. For them, architecture has the potential to have ‘stimulating effects on people and publics to be better versions of themselves, and to live differently.’ In short, design is a kind of impetus to live up to something bigger. What that is, exactly, keeps evolving.

Koreitem and May first started working together in 2012 and formalised their collaboration into a business a few years later. For them, design stretches across a wide range of activities: they write, create furniture, curate exhibitions, practise architecture and teach. Koreitem is design faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and May is an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Like many architects of their generation, juggling each of these projects is an all-consuming enterprise where the borders between different disciplines, design and research, work and life are purposefully blurry.

‘Our practice is completely multihyphenated,’ they explain. The term is the theme of a recent issue of Harvard Design Magazine that the duo guest-edited with fellow architect/educator Sean Canty. The publication theorises all the curious ways that a transdisciplinary approach reflects a zeitgeist brimming with creative possibilities.