At Brooks + Scarpa (formerly known as Pugh + Scarpa) we believe that architecture should engage the user, heighten their sense of awareness, and bring a deeper understanding and vitality to their experience. We strive to create environments that stimulate their occupants and leave lasting impressions. We encourage a culture of ingenuity and exploration that enables us to maintain a fresh approach to every project we undertake. This is true regardless of the scale – big or small, whether for public or private use, for rich or for poor. This is an approach that has often led us to reinvent established building types.
Brooks + Scarpa approaches each project as the continuation of an ongoing inquiry. This belief has produced a constant stream of inventive work leaving each client with a building which is solely their own, non-formulaic, and yet facilitates even the most mundane requisites.
Fulfilling this model of place-making drives our firm to continually explore and create new possibilities for materials, form, construction, even financing, in order to suit the organic characteristics of each commission. It also produces new incarnations of formerly common materials, which reveals extraordinary beauty from within ordinary materials. This resourceful creativity provokes thought and creates lasting connections for all who encounter our buildings.
Brooks + Scarpa is committed to conserving the environment and making intelligent use of our natural and cultural resources. We believe that societies across the globe are experiencing a shift in attitude from one merely concerned with surviving on earth to one concerned with changing how we live so that the earth can survive. We embrace this shift and seek to enhance the impact of sustainable design and development as a basic tenet of our practice. Rather than diminishing in meaning, the ideas of sustainability have the potential and power to enrich and broaden our culture as well as our architectural language.
Brooks + Scarpa is the successor architecture firm formerly known as Pugh + Scarpa, founded in Santa Monica, California in 1991. The name change reflects the natural evolution of the firm since its founding in 1991. Lawrence Scarpa, FAIA, and Angela Brooks, AIA, LEED AP, are the sole principals and the firm is consciously structured to ensure their participation in each project.