An architecture studio’s name is already something you can build with, provided you are fairly relaxed about what counts as building. For Atelier Office, we arranged the words into four different versions of the initials AO.

Led by V. Mitch McEwen, the practice moves between architecture, urban design, installations, and research. A house in Detroit becomes a food incubator, with an aquaponics farm below and a greenhouse behind. A chair called Hot Grandma takes shape under a robotic hotwire cutter. The work accommodates different scales, purposes, and ideas about what a building – or a chair – might be doing.

The system borrows from concrete poetry, where the shape of the words is part of what they say. The wordmarks can be animated, superimposed, or reconstructed from live ASCII text. A name can become an image, behave like a drawing, and go back to being text. They can also sit still on a piece of paper.