We believe in architecture that communicates and inspires, expresses identity, and encourages social interaction. Our design process integrates intuition, play, and dialogue with close analysis of each project’s physical, programmatic, and cultural context, as well as the underlying intentions of those who initiate it. Architecture, after all, is for people, and its creation is always collaborative.
Our History
Recognizing a common desire to create architectural environments that are simultaneously joyful, meaningful, and sustainable, John Friedman and Alice Kimm founded their design practice in 1995 in Los Angeles, where they discovered fertile ground for their ideas and aspirations.
Since then, JFAK has completed a wide range of projects with notable public and private clients. In the process, they have been recognized with numerous distinctions including not one, but two, Rudy Bruner Silver Medal for Urban Excellence awards, the only firm to be so honored.
How we work
Through an inquisitive design process that mines the complexities of our heterogeneous society, John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects (JFAK) creates distinct and joyful formal landscapes that encourage creative interaction, sustain the environment, and catalyze positive change for their communities.
The firm employs a diverse range of tools, including skillful distribution of natural light; experimentation with materiality, color, and texture; celebration of transparency and visual relationships, repurposing of common symbols in new ways; and always, the restless exploration of form and space to create environments that people return to over and over again, even if they don’t quite know what it is that draws them.
A project’s size, type, or budget are not important; rather, JFAK seeks out opportunities to develop innovative solutions to meaningful design challenges. New performative materials in concert with the most current design software and fabrication technologies become means to explore new kinds of efficiencies, forms, spaces, and branding possibilities.
As a matter of ethical urgency, JFAK applies the widest range of sustainable strategies – sophisticated engineering systems, simple passive techniques, recycled and smart materials – to each project. The firm’s collaborators include an ever-expanding group of artists, engineers, scientists, builders, and other specialists who, as clients, consultants, or advisers, are partners in creating integrated and environmentally sensitive environments that better the lives of their users.
