MAP is a California–based, post-disciplinary practice working across architecture, design, media, and environmental research. Since 2005, the studio has developed an internationally recognized body of work spanning residential, commercial, historic, public, and media-based projects, united by a sustained interest in how architecture engages culture, technology, ecology, and contemporary spatial experience.Rather than advancing a singular style, MAP approaches each project as a specific inquiry—shaped by site, context, program, material, and the evolving dialogue between client and practice. Conventional assumptions are treated as propositions to be tested. Research, experimentation, and close collaboration with clients, consultants, fabricators, and makers become instruments for discovering possibilities that may not be apparent at the outset.The practice combines conceptual rigor with extensive experience in project delivery, executive project management, fabrication, permitting, and negotiation with public agencies, consultants, and builders. Working for private clients and multinational organizations, MAP conceives and directs projects from initial strategy through implementation, balancing architectural ambition with the practical realities of budget, production, and construction.Over the past decade, MAP’s work has received sustained international recognition through exhibitions, publications, awards, and public programs. The practice participated in the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016 and 2023, was included in AnySpace’s opening exhibition, This Future Has a Past, at the Center for Architecture in New York, accompanied by a public panel with Barry Bergdoll, then Chief Curator of Architecture at MOMA.More recent recognition includes the publication of Architecture X Architecture: A Dialectic, a related public program at SFMOMA that addresses the book’s broader questions about architecture, images, technology, and contemporary spatial and material culture, with their architectural projects garnering Architizer’s Vision Awards in 2024 + 25.MAP’s work has been published in Architecture, Architizer, Dwell, I.D., Interior Design, Metropolis, The New York Times, Progressive Architecture, SFGate, The Wall Street Journal, and WIRED, and is represented in collections including Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Dia Art Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.Architectural projects include the restoration, completion, and adaptation of an historically significant and environmentally prescient Napa Valley residence by California modernist Jack Hillmer. Constructed from a restrained palette of redwood, concrete block, stainless steel, and glass, the house anticipated many principles now associated with environmentally responsive design. MAP’s intervention approached the building not as a modernist time capsule but as a living architectural proposition: preserving the intelligence of Hillmer’s original conception while decisively expanding an unfinished work into the 21st century.MAP continues to pursue projects that call for unconventional responses to increasingly complex cultural, environmental, and technological conditions. Whether realized as a building, interior, object, image, installation, or time-based work, the practice seeks to translate those conditions into precise, materially intelligent, and evocative spatial propositions.MAP is led by Katherine Lambert, AIA, IIDA, and Christiane Robbins.
