A’U
The name comes from the word “A’ü” in Wayuunaiki - a South American indigenous dialect, which can be translated as “seed” in English. We believe that each project is a vessel full of raw potential and opportunities to explore ideas, establish new relationships and, ultimately, create great design.
The practice
At A’U, we work with the essentials of architecture: Mass, proportion, light and color, along with program, site, budget and client requirements to reach a design that responds to our clients’ needs and to the context where it lives. Our design practice is a space for exploration where the contemporary meets the traditional, landscape meets architecture and function and form go hand-in-hand.
With a positive, imaginative and yet realistic and grounded approach to design, we see constraints as opportunities, explore options, forms, materials and typologies exhaustively to always arrive at the right individual response. The results are sometimes unexpected but address program, form and site in a cohesive manner, maximizing the performative qualities of the spaces, while acknowledging budgets and schedules.
The office
Our office has teams in New York and Bogotá, with backgrounds in different fields, including architecture, landscape architecture, interiors and real estate. We work closely with engineering and technical consultants from the onset of projects to arrive to wholistic proposals. Collaboration between disciplines is key in the process of design and development of a successful project. We encourage it not only with our consulting teams, but also with our clients.
Our principal, Juan López, has been practicing architecture since 2003 with architecture and real estate development firms including Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Alloy Development and Oppenheim Architecture. Juan has degrees in architecture from Columbia University in New York and Los Andes University in Bogotá and in real estate & finance from FIU in Miami. He spends his time between New York and Miami.
