The studio.

The studio accepts three to five new commissions a year. Each starts at a long table in London, Riyadh, or Kuala Lumpur, with the client, the site information, and a pencil.

The studio is deliberately limited. It has no borrowed directors, no office used only as an address, and no commission the principals have not walked more than once. The three founding principals remain involved from first sketch to handover. More work is declined than accepted; the record stands at 58 built projects across 18 countries.

The work sits across four registers: cultural buildings, residential, commercial, and infrastructure. There are no separate departments for each. The same teams move between them, so the cantilever in Cedar House comes from the same structural mind that drew Vertex Tower's outrigger; the cable detail in Span Bridge reappears, at a smaller scale, in the Cultural Mass canopy.

"A building is finished the day a stranger uses it without thinking. Until then, we keep drawing."

The studio works closely with three engineering offices: Lüchinger+Meyer in Zürich, SJB Kempter Fitze in St. Gallen, and Aurecon in Singapore. The fabricators are long-standing collaborators. OBELISK is rarely the cheapest studio in the room; the aim is to be the most useful one.

The London headquarters is at 78 Cromwell Place, SW7 2JE, with the model room, the 4,200-book library, and the basement workshop that has poured concrete cores for every model since 2011. Riyadh works from KAFD Tower 11. Kuala Lumpur works from 6 Persiaran KLCC, closer to the monsoon and to the tropical commissions now shaping the studio.