SPATIAL AFFAIRS BUREAU - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Management and Technology
Adam is a technology and management expert, with a background in the media industry. He was instrumental in the realization of the Light House_1 project, coordinating disciplines, refining the design, fabrication of elements and lighting control programming.
Clients include the BBC, ESPN in the US and MediaCorp in Singapore. Previously he has worked as an engineer for Ove Arup and has designed and made his own furniture.
As well as leading our model making efforts, Ann is a freelance artist, designer and teacher in the nationally renowned VCU (Virginia Commonwealth University) arts school. She often finds herself involved in a vast assortment of projects from designing and building furniture to creating public art. In her free time, Ann can be found whiling away the hours in her studio making sculpture.
Eleni has collaborated with Peter since 2002, initially working on the VMFA project together, whilst Peter worked for Rick Mather Architects and Eleni for L'Observatoire International. Subsequently Eleni worked closely with Peter on the Light House_1 installation project and on the Tree House private house project in Virginia.
Eleni has been the lighting designer for many high profile projects.
Fiona is an experienced architect and a member of Spatial Affairs Bureau's UK team, with expertise in housing, historic buildings and arts projects. Fiona was part of Peter's team on the VMFA project from 2001-2006, working together for Rick Mather Architects in both London and Richmond, VA. She subsequently spent 8 years working for Peter Barber Architects in London, as project architect on a wide variety of critically acclaimed housing and refurbishment projects. She left her associate director role in 2014 to set up her own practice and has recently joined forces with Spatial Affairs Bureau, as part of their UK team. Fiona has a strong design background and a vision for creating beautiful, functional spaces which respond to brief and client expectations in imaginative, practical and sensitive ways.
John O'Shea first worked with Peter Culley at Rick Mather Architects in 2002, to work alongside Peter on Rick's Southbank Centre Masterplan, and then for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) $200m expansion project in Richmond USA. John is as interested with detail as he is strategy and his own house, designed jointly with Richa Mukia, has been widely published.
Julius graduated from Woodbury University graduate school in 2016, winning the Best Thesis prize in the Methodology category. His thesis. advised under Peter, focussed on ‘tinkering' in architecture.
Job Titles:
- Creative Director
- Founder
- Creative Leader and Founder
Peter Culley is the creative leader and founder of Spatial Affairs Bureau - an architecture, landscape, and general design studio with projects in the UK and US.
Central to Peter's ethos for Spatial Affairs Bureau's practice is being open across disciplines and scales, recognising and embracing the limits of a scenario, and bringing experts in their fields to enable rich collaborations and experimentation. He comes from a background in cultural projects where buildings and landscape are considered hand in hand in search of a delicate balance, and tries to view the building envelope more as a uniting and critically informed filter somewhere on a sliding spectrum between interior and exterior environments, than as a hard cut-off between them. His projects tend to test out this shifting balance. He believes that design response is a carefully orchestrated reconciliatory process that operates between a series of intermeshing factors that include site needs and opportunity; client and project premise; creative intuition; and technological pertinence.
Peter's basis in cultural work stems from a decade with Rick Mather Architects, where as project director he oversaw the $200m Virginia Museum of Fine Arts museum and campus landscape expansion, and London's South Bank Centre 30-acre masterplan along the Thames across from the Houses of Parliament. He has gone on in his own practice to work with cultural clients such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Crosstown Arts, Memphis; Richmond BridgePark, Virginia; and Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. His inherent sense of landscape alongside architecture was fostered earlier, working with US landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson as project architect for the National Botanic Garden of Wales Great Glasshouse Interior Landscape, and the National Heritage Lottery Crystal Palace Park remodel and renovation project, together with John Lyall Architects.
Peter Culley believes in the importance of keeping ties with academic settings and most recently taught with Jessie Gemmer for the Corcoran School of Art and Design at George Washington University in Washington D.C. for the Exhibition Design masters course. He developed the ongoing ‘Across Spatial Boundaries' lecture series for Ravensbourne University in London (2020), has been thesis instructor for the University of Southern California's Master of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism graduate program (2016-17); Professor of Practice at Woodbury School of Architecture, Burbank, CA (2012-2016); and diploma tutor in the masters program at the Bartlett, University College London (2005-2008).
He is a UK registered architect (ARB), chartered member of the RIBA, international associate AIA member in US, serves on the UK's RIBA Visiting Board for Architecture School Accreditation, is an external examiner for University of Westminster and is trained as a Passive House consultant.
Peter lives between London and the north of Scotland where he is restoring a historic house and garden through a process of experimental research.
Job Titles:
- Artist
- Senior Landscape Designer
Sarah Cowles describes herself as an artist whose medium is design and subject is landscape. In practice with Tom Leader Studio, she coordinated design of the US Consulate in Guangzhou, China, and several large-scale redevelopment projects in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Academically, she is Associate Professor of Practice in the School of Architecture at USC. Previously she was Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at Knowlton School at The Ohio State University, where she co-organized (with Dorothée Imbert) the 2016 international symposium "THIS IS A TEST" on the role of testing and prototyping in contemporary landscape architecture practice. She has held visiting positions at Washington University and was a Fulbright Scholar at the Tbilisi State Academy of the Arts in the Republic of Georgia. Her research engages dialogue between representation and material processes in the making of landscapes at three nested scales: regional identity, disturbed sites, and the garden. Her exhibitions include The Salt Mountain Disturbance (Artisterium, Tbilisi, 2010) and Elegantly Wasted (MASS MoCA, 2012).
Cowles received her MLA from Harvard University's GSD and her BFA from the California College of the Arts.