Three Studios, One Discipline

PLINTH works out of three studios — Portland, Marfa, and Los Angeles — and the most common assumption about a practice spread across three cities is that it must, over time, drift into three different practices. We have spent twenty years making sure that does not happen, and the mechanism is simpler than people expect.

It is not a style guide. A point of view that can be written down as a set of rules is not a point of view; it is a template, and templates produce buildings that are consistent in the worst way — recognisable without being any good. What holds the three studios together is a shared way of arguing, not a shared set of answers.

One table, wherever it is

Every project, in every city, is reviewed by the same four partners at the same recurring table — physically when possible, and on a screen when not. The review is not a sign-off. It is the same interrogation each time: what is the one problem this building solves, and does every decision serve it? A studio in Marfa and a studio in Portland can reach very different formal answers to that question and still be, unmistakably, the same practice.

Consistency is not everyone drawing the same building. It's everyone asking the same question and refusing to stop until it's answered.

The material palette is narrow across all three studios — concrete, stone, timber, glass — not because we mandate it, but because those are the materials that reward the kind of resolution we care about. And the construction arm, which builds a majority of what we draw, keeps every studio honest about the gap between a beautiful drawing and a buildable one. Three studios, one discipline. It has held for twenty years, and we intend to keep it that way.