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INSIGHTS
PRACTICE PROFILE Studio Fōr
Architect Fauzia Khanani uses her role as studio principal at New York City’s Studio Fōr to combat inequality, including in architecture itself. However, as she tells James Parker, it was never her ambition to found a practice
B
ased in New York City, Studio Fōr is a young practice making its name in residential and commercial architecture, and interior design, both locally and internationally. Despite its
modest size, founder Fauzia Khanani uses her firm as a platform to campaign on issues around equality and oppression, including those close to home.
She moved to the US in the early 1970s with her family after fleeing Idi Amin’s regime in Uganda, and began her career working in public health, which led her to “make the connection between shelter and public health,” and study for an architecture degree. Deciding to found a practice “just sort of happened by chance,” when friends asked her to design a weekend house in upstate New York, but the studio is now well established, with eight staff and a varied portfolio of projects.
Fauzia leads the firm with a strongly activist approach on issues that matter to its staff; this includes being part of Design as Protest, a small collective of designers formed to “mobilise strategies to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use architecture and design as tools of oppression.” The results have ranged from ‘buildable memorials,’ to designing protest signs, to physical participation in events. Also, through Design Advocates, established in 2020, Studio Fōr has been, and remains, very engaged in several pro bono projects helping various NYC clients get through the pandemic.
Fauzia says that having founded the studio, she saw a chance to change the paradigm: “I soon realised that I potentially had an opportunity to change the practice of being an architect for myself and eventually others from unhealthy and unsustainable expectations, to a practice where fairness, health and wellness and realistic expectations are foundational.” She explains that this more equitable approach “resonates with her public health background” as well as the awareness of spaces’ “fundamental impact” on health and wellbeing. She sums her design ethos up as using architecture to “create spaces that contribute to positive public health outcomes.”
Studio evolution
Beginning as a one-woman band, Khanani began to collaborate with architect friends to tackle the workload of multiple projects
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underway simultaneously. In late 2014, she hired her first full time employee to do office admin and marketing “because I no longer had time to invoice clients and put a website together!” She says that most staff get to work on both “technical and aesthetic aspects,” and on a variety of projects from residential to workplace to community.
She says the firm operates on the basis that “each client and their needs are unique, so the solutions they receive from us are also designed specifically for them; every project is unique.” Fauzia adds that they strive to provide an equitable level of design quality across all clients, as “everyone deserves good design, regardless of project size and budget.” Studio Fōr has a handful of hospitality and “community-based” projects under its belt, and is trying to grow in those sectors. While its residential new build and renovation commissions have been generally in New York State, workplace schemes have ranged across the globe.
When it comes to tackling the pandemic, after full remote working until summer 2021, staff moved to hybrid working days through to the end of year, when the practice we moved into a new office. They are currently transitioning to staff working in the office
ADF MARCH 2022
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