Taking the architect’s view

I’m no Michael Hsu, but I can appreciate the imagination required to design our gathering spaces and our collective future.

A spectacular sunset from the third floor of the new Michael Hsu Office of Architecture in North Austin.

Last week, I watched a spectacular sunset through the window of a building where people spend their days designing our future.

This was at a lovely little open house for the new offices of Michael Hsu Office of Architecture, a local firm that has had an impact on architectural trends nationwide, particularly through its work with brands like Shake Shack, Uchi and P. Terry’s. 

When Uchi opened in a little house on South Lamar in 2005, Hsu and designer Joel Mozersky couldn’t have imagined that they were creating a new kind of restaurant aesthetic: exposed wood joinery, sophisticated lighting and Instagram-worthy wallpaper five years before Instagram existed. (I wrote a whole story in 2019 for Metropolis about how “the Hsu effect” has, in some ways, come to define modern architecture in Texas.)

Hsu is someone I’ve interviewed a number of times over the years for my architectural freelance side hustle, which started somewhat randomly about a decade ago, when Dwell needed an Austin-based writer for a quick turnaround story about the new green room at Stubb’s.

Over the process of writing these stories — most recently about a new campus of Collin College Technical Campus in the Dallas area — I have learned that although there is so much overlap between, say, restaurant owners and the architects that design those restaurants, they use different languages to describe their work and have different priorities that drive their decisions.

And to think like an architect means appreciating good design, even though it was designed, in part, for you not to see it. (Roman Mars’ podcast is called “99% Invisible,” for a season.)

The North Village Branch of the Austin Public Library was designed by the Austin-based architecture firm Limbacher & Godfrey and completed in 2007.

I’m writing this week’s newsletter from a library in Austin that has tall ceilings, mismatched square and rectangular windows, lots of natural light and a statement art piece hanging from the ceiling. The furniture — a square of nine perfectly cushioned seats — encourages people to stay a while. Each of these elements helps to create a calming area conducive for learning (and writing).

These libraries and office complexes and restaurants are what architects would call a third space. Not our home. Not our workplace. A site where you can gather, grow and, frankly, get a break from your house.

And they are critical to a thriving society.

Uchi was Michael Hsu’s breakout project in 2005. (Contributed by Michael Hsu Office of Architecture.)

Less than two decades after Hsu’s breakout project, his team now operates out of a split-level office in North Austin with about 90 staffers, including team members in Denver, Nashville and Houston.

At the open house on Thursday, I chatted with three or four of the newer hires, all wonderful people who moved from somewhere else to start their own Austin story.