Annie Chu, FAIA, IIDA (B.Arch '83) and Rick Gooding (B.Arch '84): Friction: A Duality

Chu+Gooding Architects is an internationally acclaimed architecture and interiors firm with an emphasis on cultural, arts-related, educational, and institutional projects, and recognized for designing distinctive and sophisticated spaces. Since the firm’s establishment in 1996, Annie Chu (B.Arch '83) and Rick Gooding (B.Arch '84) have built an award-winning body of work as principals of their own firm and as partner or senior associates of the celebrated firms of Franklin D. Israel design associates, Richard Meier & Partners, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien & Associates in New York. With a hands-on and deeply collaborative approach, Chu+Gooding offers distinctive, human-focused design that thoughtfully integrates architecture, interiors, and landscape to create a refined experience of space, light, material, craft, and color.

Friction: A Duality

Friction is a condition that foments a partnership. That’s the rub… two things happening at once, two bodies, two heads are better than one? The process can be smooth, but more often than not, it is a struggle: roughness against roughness that generates heat and slows us down — but ultimately propels us forward. This is the modality of our work process. The condition of overlap is critical, and paradoxically, any commonality is also founded in our difference. The rub scales up and down continuously from a pair to a group, and the work demands time to translate between ideas and materiality, to consider building craft, and to respond to the exigencies of our human condition. It demands a commitment to difference. Our difference is not always dissension, but it causes wear and tear over time. We are in a constant state of destruction and repair. With this process, ideas and operations are made material; without this friction, there is no structure, no trajectory, and no conviction.