About Us
Vision
Open Form Architecture is devoted to a deep and innovative approach to creating contemporary architecture and urbanism; and dedicated to producing transformative experiences by shaping new paths for architecture, urbanism and public space. The office follows a rigorous thought process that simultaneously questions the representation of buildings, the shape of cites, and the conceptual models and processes through the application of new computational technologies.
Technology
For Open Form, digital technologies open up the spectrum of possibilities in architecture and design. Whether it is in the development and application of technologies for the building itself, or in the creation of advanced architecture, technologies generate new contexts, new perceptions, and surprising perspectives between the relationship of creating and producing new architectural forms. From this creative boiling emerges an open architecture: Open Form Architecture.
The influence of powerful new softwares now permits the exploration of inventive forms with ever greater ease. One problem is that during conception, they hide the complexity of constructability, economy and feasibility. Open Form has dealt with these issues many times, and has developed methods for taking these complex geometries to materiality, fabrication and constructability. In the early years of collaboration since 2004, the partners have helped other offices achieve ambitious and surprising buildings. Such projects are the Musée de la Nation Huronne-Wendat in Wendake, the building envelop for the new mega-project, McGill University Hospital in Montréal, the Cirque du Soleil Theatre in Brazil, or the M3M Housing Project in India. Using computational tools, Open Form acts as a catalyst of change and innovation. Through new approaches to design, and the use of computational tools, our office creates new fields of opportunity for building professionals. Each idea relates to new methods of describing, producing and constructing architectural form.
Mission
The mission of Open Form Architecture is to enrich architectural creation through a complementary strategy of applied research and real-world building. Working with clients, digital tools allow for us and the design team to continually explore different design paths and solutions, and to optimise a final design for its production, on time and within budget. Simultaneously, the optimization of the design occurs with engineers and other consultants to generate effective geometries, material solutions and the optimal formal solution for the project. We rationalize our concepts and complex forms through a tacit knowledge of geometry, production methods and materiality.
Collaborators
Each project is born out of its specific context and logic, and through the intensive creativity and collaboration of Open Form, managed by the three partners: Maxime Moreau, Maurice Martel and Darrel Ronald. From each of our broad experiences internationally, on different scales and typologies, and on a variety of demanding programmatic and spatial situations, gives us our distinct individual attitudes and processes that guarantees a quality of architecture and urbanism. Through supported interdisciplinary collaboration, each Open Form project integrates the know-how and experience of partner consultants, in a chain of technology, engineering, sustainability and architectural form. Further, our cooperation with fabrication experts following our research into digital fabrication, Prototyping Architecture, has permitted Open Form to benefit from an important reserve of knowledge in craftsmanship, technology and digital fabrication allowing us to realize complex architectures.