The architect Judith Haase and scenographer Pierre Jorge Gonzalez met in 1996 near New York, at theater director Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. Both were involved in its renovation. When they opened their own office in 1999 in Paris and Berlin, they had already gathered experience in stage design, exhibition design, and architecture. They were profoundly shaped by the Minimal Art they discovered for themselves in New York and which forms the foundation of their design thinking.
Their work encompasses a spectrum including residential housing, retail spaces, restaurants, offices, building lobbies, exhibition and gallery spaces, lighting design, and independent projects. Never forgetting the context, substance or history of the given place, a distinctive identity is lent to each of their projects. The creatives are housed on the third and fourth floors: here, at workbenches, in cutting rooms and conference rooms, ideas are generated; concepts are developed and tested. The third floor is kept black; mirrors are mounted in corners, so one’s own reflection disappears inside or only halfway enters the picture, and the rooms seem to close themselves off. Whereas on the fourth floor, dominated by the color red, the mirror installations seem to double everything.
The sixth floor, the attic story, is a shared recreation space that can be used for informal meetings, events, working, or eating lunch. Here Gonzalez Haase designed the ceiling as a “green screen,” a color suggesting a place of openness where nothing is predetermined. To offer the agency a chance of telling a story about the new premises, Gonzalez Haase AAS embedded something of a hidden script inside their design, inspired by figures from Alice in Wonderland. The executive floor refers to the caterpillar Absolem; the attic floor refers to the March Hare; the third floor refers to the Cheshire Cat; the fourth floor refers to Tweedledee and Tweedledum. But this script does nothing to determine the atmosphere of the rooms; this is achieved in how Gonzalez Haase AAS handles light, material, and architecture to lend each space its own individual and yet holistically cohesive character.
The architect Judith Haase and scenographer Pierre Jorge Gonzalez met in 1996 near New York, at theater director Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. Both were involved in its renovation. When they opened their own office in 1999 in Paris and Berlin, they had already gathered experience in stage design, exhibition design, and architecture.
They were profoundly shaped by the Minimal Art they discovered for themselves in New York and which forms the foundation of their design thinking
