Founded by Michel Da Costa Goncalves and Amrita Mahindroo, DROO is a RIBA and RICS Award-winning practice operating worldwide from our office in London. Da Costa Mahindroo Architects, or DROO, takes a wholistic approach to design from the object to the urban.
We believe that every intervention we make in the built environment comes at an expense, be it environmental (no matter how small) or financial, and so we believe every intervention has to make a significant contribution to its location, its context, the people it impacts everyday through use and its broader environment. We look closely at the complex network of conditions and the web of links to a global network of conditions for each project to make sure we are making the most significant contributions to better the human experience and make a positive contribution to our built and natural environments towards a considered legacy.
Our work spans Europe, North America, Australia and South East Asia with a strong research focus on cities. We’re committed to developing and promoting architectural creativity to serve each contexts and communities.
Find out more about our latest contributions as well as latest publications about our work on the Press and Publications sections.
We strive to make places by understanding each scale as ecosystems of users, situations, and opportunities. From the nuclear home to the building, from the neighbourhood to the city, we actively engage with urban conditions through its many parts.
We understand sustainability through time, from the urgency imposed by climate deregulations and the important legacy of long-lasting buildings. Our approach is one of stewardship and circularity which seeks to extend the life of all buildings, through material re use but also to allow for changes is creating a durable cultural contribution.
Through children’s books, lectures, exhibition, or higher education workshops, we are dedicated in passing on our engagement in the inclusive betterment of shared spaces. Using our personal journeys and the communal experience, we attempt to highlight the designer’s roles today.
If you wish to contact us to organise or participate in future events, please use info@drooprojects.com.
Urban distributed By some estimate Amazon has an inventory of about 12 million available items and counting. It is fair to say that this number easily trumps any big box retailer or logically any average street retail. This distributed shop is unmatched by choice and increasingly by availability but our increasing reliance on remote shopping…
Our society is premised on this need for moving in a direction and for the better part of the 20th and early 21st century this has been based on ‘more’. For the past decade we have been seeking answers on how to grow in a more cyclical way, by building and reinventing what we have, addressing typology,…
Floating, hovering, suspended gardens… How to make a garden fly? At the heart of our Paris Gateway project, our suspended garden aimed to resolve conflicting constraints. The very valuable « ground plane » needed to be used for transport whilst other underground infrastructures occupying the whole site made it impossible to plant. Simultaneously, the elevated…
Spatial sequencing Without theological commentary intended, our answer for a new Russian Orthodox Church was the literal sequencing of its spatial DNA. Simultaneously as an answer to the trapezoidal site and its oddness in regards to contemporary design, we choose to slice and displace an archetypal model to create a new species. The gradient translation…
Born of our investigations into material reuse, the Castle Lane was at his inception a opportunity to study of a special brick aggregate. Giving a second life to the demolished building, we studied the solution composed wit aggregate panels made of the crushed brick from the site itself. One of expectations when working in an…
The Fractal Tree is the manifestation of geometrical play stemming from the growth logic of tree branches. Operating as a city sculpture and a sustainable device, the timber structure transforms itself and its environment over the course of the day. Both metaphor and abstraction of its natural source, DROO’s fractal tree is an active abstraction…
MODERN THEATRES 1950-2020 which includes a contribution by DROO Architects’ director Michel da Costa Gonçalves is a fantastic book edited by David Staples and published by Routledge. Michel explores today’s perception of the Opera Bastille in light of its very political inception and using his past experience designing cultural venues such as the Onassis Opera…
Research through design, our Song Do Library proposal. Designed with both a sense of material frugality and experiential monumentality, our proposal sees the Library as a dynamic movement of ideas within an ecosystem defining by two interacting environments: the central garden and main library’s stepped agora. Symbolic and active, the engineered timber shell closes…
