DESIGNER’s STORY
PARTISANS is an award-winning architecture studio that specializes in the integration of design and programming, invention and activation, installations and creative services. Our diverse team of architects, artists, storytellers, cultural enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs produces work across mediums and scales, combining old-world craftsmanship, new-world technologies, and deft programming to subvert expectations and create meaningful built experiences.
The studio was founded on a conviction: Architecture is not just the act of designing a building; it’s a way of seeing, thinking, and making that expands and even revolutionizes our experience of the world. To that end, we believe that the relevance of our practice is inextricably linked to working across disciplines and forging public engagement through art, thought leadership, and cultural interventions that mobilize critical thinking, imagination, and community.
We aspire to be city builders building better cities by innovating on the front lines of ideas, culture, forms, materials, and typologies. Our cause: smart, high-performance design that strives to make the impossible probable.
Alex Josephson, Cofounder of PARTISANS
Alex Josephson cofounded PARTISANS in 2012 after studying architecture at the University of Waterloo, the University of Rome, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA). PARTISANS is comprised of architects, designers, thinkers, and cultural enthusiasts whose work across all scales is devoted to a cause: high-performance design that strives to make the improbable possible. The studio’s projects have been featured in Wallpaper, Dezeen, Frame, designboom, and The New York Times, and won numerous awards, including the R+D Award, Azure’s AZ Awards, and the Ontario Association of Architects’ Best Emerging Practice and Design Excellence awards. The only Canadian to have ever received the New York Prize Fellowship at the Van Alen Institute, Alex was named 2016 Best Emerging Designer by Canada’s Design Exchange. He currently lectures at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture.
READ MORE BRAND DESIGNER’s STORIES
A new found passion for welding allowed Tom to teach himself to make tough metal structures – his hobby rapidly expanded into a knack for making furniture from found objects. The welded salvage furniture quickly found a clientele and as a result Dixon evolved seamlessly over the next few years from welder to craftsman to
To describe his work as a designer, Emmanuel likes to quote Constantin Brancusi “Simplicity is complexity resolved”. Elegance, clarity and simplicity are key to Emmanuel Gallina’s work. His creative ethic at authenticity and coherence is embodied in every one of his projects. To him, attention to detail is a constant priority in the contours, shapes
As a child, Marcel Wanders loved making gifts for people. Nowadays he designs for the world, making unique gifts that are meaningful to the people receiving them as well as to the designer himself. Marcel is on a mission which he had already thought of and planned during his time as a student: Here to
Christophe Delcourt is a name that began to circulate among the French design crowd at the end of the 1990s. Delcourt’s style finds its full expression in exquisite balance between purity of design, sophistication of materials and impeccable execution.
Born in Adria in 1950, he began to attend the Architectural Faculty at the Venice University in 1968 and occupied himself with the research in the visual area. In 1970 he co-operated to the realisation of the project concerning WIG 74 competition on behalf of Vienna and to the competition for the RESISTENZA MONUMENT in
Boris Klimek graduated in studies of Product and Conceptual Design on Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague. Currently he works in Prague, where he focus on product and interior design. In his work he tries to find a certain conceptual overlaps, games and stories.
