OFFICE FOR REPAIR
[oFR]
systems and spatial
design studio
We identify the missed connections and opportunities between land, labour, materials and community and we design, research and build the projects that reconnect them.
Every project is a live prototype and a case study: knowledge generated in the field circulates back into practice, and practice generates new questions for research. Our role is not to author solutions but to design the conditions in which places can repair themselves.
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SERVICES
GROUNDWORKWe map the ecological, social and material conditions of a place before anything is designed. Fieldwork, community research and systems analysis that give you — and us — a clear evidence base for what repair actually requires.
SPATIAL DESIGNArchitecture and urban design grounded in local ecologies, material intelligence and social resilience. We design and retrofit buildings and public spaces that work with the systems around them, not against them.
CAPACITY & CO-DESIGNWorkshops, training and toolkits that put skills and decision-making into local hands. We use making — prototyping, material testing, construction — as a participatory language for building ownership and long-term stewardship.
STRATEGIC & SYSTEMS DESIGNAdvisory and strategic collaboration for complex projects, organisations and masterplans. We bring systems thinking, co-creation and biobased material expertise to places in transition — helping shape visions and implementation frameworks that hold together across disciplines.
RESEARCH & PUBLICATION
Practice-based research, writing and knowledge exchange that make what we learn in the field useful beyond it. We produce publications, exhibitions and collaborations that connect local knowledge to institutional frameworks and wider audiences.
WHY WE EXIST
The way we build, the way we cultivate land, and the way people move through the world are expressions of the same system. They are almost never treated that way.
Architecture is producing environments that do not last. The industrialisation of construction has severed it from local craft, material knowledge and the communities it claims to serve. Buildings are designed without their users, built to extract value rather than sustain it, and disconnected from the ecological systems they sit within.
Agroecology is under pressure everywhere. Soil is being exhausted faster than it can recover. Landscapes have been stripped of the biodiversity and water retention that make them resilient. The metabolism of place — the flows that keep land alive — has been broken by decades of linear, extractive use.
Displacement is accelerating. Climate disruption is forcing movement at a scale and pace that existing infrastructure cannot absorb. But displacement does not begin with the moment of departure. It begins with gentrification pricing communities out of their neighbourhoods, with rural depopulation driven by soil failure and economic collapse, with the slow erosion of the local knowledge and belonging that make a place worth staying in.
Rather than understanding these as three separate crises, we perceive them as a single system failing in three ways. Repairing any one of them without the others deepens the fracture. A building without its ecology is a liability. A landscape without the people who can steward it is a finite resource. A community displaced from its land loses the capacity to maintain either.
Today's crises are systemic, but so are the possibilities they open.
Regenerative design replaces extraction with circular flows of value, reciprocity between people and nature, and balance across generations. It treats repair not as a remedial act but as the starting point for everything.
OFR designs beyond mitigation in a century of disruption. And we are part of a growing movement working toward futures that are alive, adaptive and shared.
WHO WE WORK WITH
Community groups; non-profits and civic organisations; architects and designers; developers and investors; public authorities; cultural, educational and research institutions.
Past and current work includes:
Commissions by — Climate-KIC; Juntos Farm; Organizacion Ecologica Sol y Verde; Re-Alliance
Collaborations with — ARUP; Calthorpe Community Gardens; Camden Council; Cambridge University; Central St Martins; Consell Insular d'Eivissa; Lendlease; Somers Town Community Association; University of the Arts London; University of Texas (UTEP)
Funding by — Earth Alliance; European Institute of Technology (EIT Food); Honnold Foundation; Kettle's Yard Fund; RIBA; Wren Association
EXPERTISE
systems design; spatial strategy and masterplanning; architectural design; retrofit and adaptive reuse; public realm design; co-design and engagement; community programming; knowledge exchange; mapping and site analysis; biobased and low-carbon materials; rural and urban resilience; climate stressed environments and adaptation.
CONTACT
Sollicitudin Euismod
Founder
Pellentesque Grounds, Porta Libero
0422 221 072
sollicitudin@vestibulum.com
Egestas Convallis
Deputy Parturient Dictum
Duis & Ultricies Vestibulum
egestas.convallis@vestibulum.edu
0402 254 956