about


area. Anca Trandafirescu, Glenn Wilcox…
The first thing to know about area. is that we are designers, architects, makers, fabricators, and computer geeks not afraid to get our hands dirty. The two principals Anca Trandafirescu and Glenn Wilcox are committed educators that teach at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan while maintaining their practice. We work at all kinds of scales, institutional buildings, houses, installations, set designs, material research, furniture, objects, and less categorical investigations. This website doesn’t contain everything we do – nor is it updated frequently enough – as we are out trying to get stuff done! But it merely serves as a somewhat informal venue for us to make public some of our work and interests. We could say that area. officially began in 2003 with becoming finalists in the Chicago Prize Competition – we thought the occasion should be marked by the significance of a name although Glenn and Anca having already worked together in some form since 1993. area. is an acronym for nothing, which is unusually these days – but stands in for being both specific – as in the demarcation of an area to build and completely generic. Something we felt comfortable with given our broad range of interests – and our desire to work intensively on the thing at hand – yet not limit our ability to expand and spread out in terms of how one might define a form of practice. So area. was more or less born and continues – mostly make-shift, around our kitchen table, doors on sawhorses, cafes in town, in our garage and the shop at the university. Each project is approached with an open agenda, experimental investigations, research, and an interest in just working things out. Through our work we engage architecture as range of interrelated issues from it being a form of cultural production, to digital technologies and methodologies, sustainability, tectonics, fabrication, materiality, and use. This open process and plurality of practice enables area. to produce and operate in a multiplicity of environments at varying degrees of scale.

Selected Awards

2011 Honorable Mention, Hot Air, ACSA Faculty Design Award

2010 Runner-Up, TEX-FAB Repeat Competition, TEX-FAB, Houston, TX

2010 Top 10, 10up Atlanta Competition, Young Architects Forum, Atlanta, GA

2008 Honorable Mention, 99K House Competition, Rice Design Alliance, Houston, TX

2007 3rd Prize, St. Louis Folly Competition, St. Louis AIA, St. Louis, MO

2007 Design Merit, Decatur Modern Design Competition, Decatur Modern, Atlanta, GA

2005 AIA Merit Award, 2750 Lawrence St. Renovation, SW Oregon AIA, Eugene, OR

2005 2nd Prize, Urban Reserve Design Competition, Urban Reserve, Dallas, TX

2003 Finalist, Chicago Prize Design Competition, Chicago Architects Club, Chicago, IL

2002 Finalist, Memorial Bench Design Competition,Jacobs Gallery, Eugene, OR

2000 Honorable Mention, Urban Poetry Design Competition, Cincinnati AIA, Cincinnati, OH

Selected Exhibits

2011 99K House, The Lean Years Exhibit, Architecture Gallery, University of Michigan, MI

2011 tetra | n, TEX-FAB Repeat Competition Exhibit, UTA, Houston, TX

2009 Assemblies and Aggregations, Architecture Gallery, University of Michigan, MI

2009 House of Arts and Culture, Lebanon Ministry of Culture, Beruit, Lebanon

2008 99K House, Rice Design Alliance, Houston AIA, Houston, TX

2005 Urban Reserve House, Dallas AIA, Dallas, TX

2005 Parachute Pavilion, Van Alen Institute, NY

2005 C2C Home, West Virginia Museum of Art, WV

2004 Holocaust Resource Center, Jewett Hall Gallery, UMA, Augusta, ME

2003 Chicago Transit Portal, Chicago Architects Club, Chicago, IL