DEMX architecture

Northwest Arkansas based architecture firm with experience ranging from small residential projects to large commercial and institutional projects.

Firm Philosophy

Vernacular Modernism

Vernacular building types exhibit our most essential responses to the environment. Response to light, air, water, vegetation, materials, and topography are evident through critical analysis of these built forms. These essential structures preference the relationship between context and use over the display of pretentiousness, social standing, or ersatz historicism and its attendant cultural baggage. Contrary to buildings of ‘stature’, vernacular structures age with grace, gaining perceived value and acceptance while becoming a part of the ‘geography’ rather than a reflection of the taste of an era.

Modernism, dependent upon the ideals of material production and assembly, is a force of liberation from the entrenched ‘styles’ promoted by market forces and in direct conflict with the appropriate use of materials and response to site. It is not a style. Modernism, like vernacular-based responses, reflects the rational use of materials and response to context.

Our practice is dependent upon the conflation of these two ideals. Though one is a priori, the other strategic, their employment provides an opportunity to pursue sustainable practices rooted in spatial efficiency, material optimization, and contextual response. Our decisions are bound by rationale, not style; by efficiency, not pretense. It is our belief that an architecture of dignity emerges from these parallel ideals.