The way we experience space, time and architecture has irrevocably changed somehow and some reassessment is necessary. We have passed a threshold where subjective ordering of reality has superseded the notion of a shared objective world. Contrary to 20th-century prophesies of total reification, we have arrived at something strangely like its opposite: a state more akin to dreaming, where people move as dreamers through shimmering personal worlds, oscillating between total control over and total scepticism of narrative, meaning and phenomena. Grappling with this new condition drives the origin story of Preliminary Research Office (PRO). Like all California stories, this one starts elsewhere. PRO was founded by Yaohua Wang in New York in 2014. Chloe Brunner joined as partner in 2016.This is a California story in the sense that both partners graduated from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), then Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), two years apart, working between degrees with various storied Los Angeles firms (Wang with Wes Jones and Oyler Wu, and Brunner at Morphosis), and are now back working from LA on projects local, international and nowhere (in the sense of place-agnostic experiments exhibited physically and virtually). You can see their work on their Instagram, a provisional archive ordering the embryonic growth of a firm into a story.
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