GRAFT GmbH
Phone: +49-30-30645103
Email: GENERAL INQUIRIES | berlin@graftlab.com , BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT | bd@graftlab.com PRESS , INQUIRIES | pr@graftlab.com
Website: https://graftlab.com/en
Biography:
The English word ‘graft’ provokes a variety of meanings and multiple readings. It stands for transplants in the field of medicine, but also for hard work.
In the terminology of botany, grafting is described as the addition of one shoot onto a genetically different host.
The positive properties of two genetically different cultures are combined in the new biological hybrid.
What is GRAFT in architecture?
Using this example in botany as a point of departure, we understand it at GRAFT as a phenomenon in human culture and examine its implications for Architecture. We live in an age where the identity of the individual becomes displaced from his original physical context and has to continually find new identities by engaging with local and global environments, enriching new definitions through changed locations and media. How can we define ‘identity in motion’? What is fixed and what is mutable? How can the two conditions in varying states of equilibrium continue to support and benefit one another?
The traditional boundaries of Architecture must be increasingly questioned to include interdisciplinary methods and techniques that as a matter of practice expand the quest for meaning and enrichment. Typically, our research spans a wide variety of archetypes from different sources: high culture, low culture, philosophy, banality, architecture, movies, literature, sports etc. Analysis, communication, and thereby the creation of relationships between and across these entities is GRAFT. Our product refuses to accept the exclusive limitations of artificial borders between disciplines and elements and opens new possibilities for the creation of expansive results. Unexpected and surprising misunderstandings, global transfer of spatial quality, and the production of robust crossbreeds – an architecture derived out of circumstances, which can only be created through the grafting of different realities.
Spread across continents, multiple disciplines and experience levels there is a mix of native and foreign at all locations and in all phases of a GRAFT project. The consequential connections and adjacencies produced and mutated out of this richness of process both inspire and drive GRAFT and its body of work.
GRAFT was established in 1998 in Los Angeles, California by Lars Krückeberg, Wolfram Putz, and Thomas Willemeit. Further offices followed in Berlin, Germany, in 2001 and Beijing, China, in 2004.
GRAFT was conceived as a «Label» for Architecture, Urban Planning, Design, Music and the »pursuit of happiness«. Since the firm was established, it has been commissioned to design and manage a wide range of projects in multiple disciplines and locations. With the core of the firm’s enterprises gravitating around the field of architecture and the built environment, GRAFT has always maintained an interest in crossing the boundaries between disciplines and »grafting« the creative potentials and methodologies of different realities. This is reflected in the firm’s expansion into the fields of exhibition design and product design, art installations, academic projects and »events« as well as in the variety of project locations in Germany, China, UAE, Russia, Georgia, in the U.S. and Mexico, to name a few.
Our collective professional experience encompasses a wide array of building types including Fine Arts, Educational, Institutional, Commercial and Residential facilities. The firm has won numerous international awards. With a staff of talented architectural professionals and administrators, GRAFT has the resources and
technology necessary to execute a project from programming to design and through construction, including construction documents, construction administration, and governmental agency review phases.
GRAFT has rigorously undertaken an increasing role in programming, master-planning and urban design. Additionally, our firm maintains successful relationships, as needed, with associate architectural and engineering firms and specialty consultants.
LARS KRÜCKEBERG
M.Arch., Dipl.-Ing. Architekt, BDA
Founding Partner of GRAFT
Lars Krückeberg studied architecture at the Technical University Braunschweig, Germany, where he graduated with a Dipl.-Ing. Arch. He received his Master of Architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Los Angeles, USA. In 1998 Lars Krückeberg established GRAFT in Los Angeles together with Wolfram Putz, and Thomas Willemeit. GRAFT has won numerous national and international awards and garnered international fame with a widespread following throughout its existence. GRAFT today employs 100 architects and designers worldwide.
WOLFRAM PUTZ
M.Arch., Dipl.-Ing. Architekt, BDA
Founding Partner of GRAFT
Wolfram Putz studied architecture at the Technical University Braunschweig, Germany, where he graduated with a Dipl.-Ing. Arch. He received his Master of Architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Los Angeles, USA. In 1998 Wolfram Putz established GRAFT in Los Angeles together with Thomas Willemeit, and Lars Krückeberg. GRAFT has won numerous national and international awards and garnered international fame with a wide-spread following throughout its existence. GRAFT today employs 100 architects and designers worldwide.
THOMAS WILLEMEIT
Dipl.-Ing. Architekt, BDA
Founding Partner of GRAFT
Thomas Willemeit studied architecture at the Technical University Braunschweig where he graduated with a Dipl.-Ing. Arch. Besides his successful career in the architectural field, he won numerous national prizes as a violin player and a chorister. In 1998 Thomas Willemeit established GRAFT in Los Angeles together with Wolfram Putz, and Lars Krückeberg. GRAFT has won numerous national and international awards and garnered international fame with a widespread following throughout its existence. GRAFT today employs 100 architects and designers worldwide.
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