Favre Design Studio is a globally recognized, New York City-based architecture and design firm specializing in residential and hospitality environments. The studio is dedicated to crafting eco-responsible luxury buildings around the world, merging environmental intelligence with refined, contemporary design.
Award-winning and internationally active, the practice is driven by the creation of spaces that are playful, studied, and unexpected. Where architectural rigor meets emotion, and innovation serves both people and planet. Each project is conceived as a dialogue between form, function, and nature, resulting in bespoke environments that are both timeless and forward-thinking.
In the two fields of rammed earth and liquid earth, the focus is on a standardised modular construction method. The goal is ceiling and wall systems that can be efficiently manufactured using timber frames and robots. Research is being conducted on material properties. Liquid earth behaves almost like concrete. It can be installed quickly, but it contains aggregates. Rammed earth is free of additives and therefore easier to reuse. In addition, the work involves components up to mock-ups and built case studies. The aim is reliable values, better load-bearing capacity, and faster installation. This is how earth construction should become affordable and more marketable.
Philippe Favre, CEO
Architecture We are architects. We use design and architecture as a positive force in the world.
For 35 years, architecture has been the core of Favre Design Studio, often in combination with other disciplines. Our projects range from beehives to opera houses and large masterplans, with concepts born out of careful consideration of the context and landscape in which they are situated.
Architecture dates back to the very start of Favre Design, when we set up a small architecture and landscape collective in New York. In 1989, we won our first significant commission to revive the ancient library of Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt. Integrating landscape and architecture, and also art and interior, this project became defining to Favre Design Studio's transdisciplinary approach, where the disciplines work holistically to constitute a greater sum than its individual parts.
Landscape Architecture We are landscape architects. We consider ourselves as editors, optimists, and curators that shape land to realize its potential.
Landscapes hold wondrous power. They connect human and non-human worlds; they can comfort or confront, inspire, or frighten. Landscapes are simultaneously young and ancient; they will always exist and continue to change regardless of design or intervention. Yet, while landscapes can be shaped by an accumulation of forces and time, they can be imagined through image, text, and storytelling. Favre Design Studio's landscape architects perform within this dynamic medium, conducting the invention and design of projects from ecosystems and parks to pavilions, plazas, streetscapes, and masterplans.
Responsible design
Recognizing that buildings and their construction operations significantly contribute to negative climate effects, we approach each project with a focus on building responsibly while also creating places for people, plants, and animals to co-exist while reducing negative environmental impact.
Further commitments to social sensitivity are central to our work. Shaping the built environment and designing for humanistic sensitivity is embedded in our thinking. Every project is a unique expression of the ethos of its users and location in relation to climate and diverse social constructs.
We place a great deal of emphasis on understanding the habitat of a place, which includes all its living creatures in biotic and abiotic relationships.
For each project, we investigate the specific site to best support the natural habitats and how soil, vegetation, flora and fauna can play a positive role in our development
For several decades, we have researched and experimented with energy-positive structures that are net carbon neutral over their lifecycles while serving as pleasant spaces for their occupants. A key focus area for us has been to design buildings that pay back their CO2 footprint at the latest over their lifetime by returning clean energy to society, offsetting the fossil energy that otherwise exists in the energy mix. We have proven that these structures can be built with existing technology. We now aim to scale up this strategy into the rest of our portfolio and, ultimately, the rest of the construction industry.
Narration
Our work considers the interconnectedness of human life with both the visible and invisible characteristics of nature to reveal latent qualities and unrealized possibilities of all that may be constructed. In our studios around the globe – from the prairies of Canada to the Eucalyptus forests of Australia – qualities of flora, fauna, and the geophysical, geological, climatic, historical, and cultural are specifically and uniquely regarded. Engaging this breadth of participation comes with challenges and requires creative translation to relate to the scale of a human user. At this point of translation, it is here that narrative is most vital.
Context
Humans are, by nature, social creatures. The places where we spend time are the places where we observe, collaborate, and interact with the world around us. Our work neither stands alone nor is context-free. This encourages us to embrace and explore site complexity: from sites shaped by existing infrastructure and constructed ground to those composed of three-dimensional layering of geology, water, structures, and cultural histories, to often-overlooked spaces of the in-between or forgotten territories: to stepping into the vast expanse of the once-wild lands across the globe.
We begin by questioning assumptions and by considering the context of environmental, cultural, and historical conditions of the sites and the people we engage. We design by making physical and digital models and drawings of all kinds. We evaluate ideas by writing and discussing them, and we inform and refine these explorations by bringing them to the site during the design process. We consider ourselves as editors, as optimists, and as curators that shape the land to realize potential.
Interior Architecture We are interior architects. We explore how people respond to, and interact with their surroundings to create holistic, inclusive and functional spaces.
We work with the framework of functions, space planning, and layout solutions and use interior architecture as a tool to integrate this thoroughly and meaningfully.
At Favre Design Studio, Interior Architecture is one of many disciplines. Our teams work on both individual interior projects and as part of larger transdisciplinary projects. Integrating interior in our work traces back to our first defining project, the new library in Alexandria, and became an integral part of Favre Design Studio when we designed the interiors for the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, which opened in 2008.
We work on both small and large scales and a variety of typologies with a strong focus on cultural projects.