What Is This?

For decades, we—wandering architecture people—have been searching for a home.
Not a credentialed room. Not a guarded institution.
Just a place to enter without an ID, without being known.

To steady ourselves, we whispered:

“Stranger, if you pass me and desire to speak,
why should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?”

Few answered.

So we decided to build that missing place ourselves.

We contend that this is that place:
a maison, or perhaps only a manoir—
a retreat from the surrounding fanfare;
a space to settle, to contemplate, to gaze toward the horizon,
or simply to exhale.

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Who Are the People?

The people here—this house of commons—are the hoi polloi, the plebeians.
But above all, what they share is architecture.

They do not merely love architecture;
they live architecture.

They are obsessed.

They read analytically.
They think critically.
They listen curiously.

They have one enduring concern: architecture.

They unsettle others—friends, colleagues, even family—
because they speak of little else.

Have you met such a person before?
If so, you already know who belongs here.

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What Do We Do?

We research and design the most unprecedented—or least precedented—questions in architecture.

Our work may take many forms:

• publications

• presentations and lectures

• education, training, and public awareness

• speculative projects and built proposals

For this reason, we describe NoNames as a design research architecture society—
a community, a foundation, or simply a design research think tank.

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What Is the Cost?

If this sounds too romantic or too idealistic,
we suggest returning to your desk—or worse, your computer—
to draw the same lines you have drawn for decades,
and to try to forget this entirely.

But if not—

Join us in cultivating architectural time and architectural thought.
In advancing Project Architecture—
for the architecture we love,
and the architecture we live.