STUDIO V Architecture is an award-winning architecture and urban design firm that seeks to reimagine the 21stcentury urban condition. We specialize in transit-oriented developments and waterfront urban design at all scales, and adaptive reuse projects that repurpose historic structures for public use.
We believe cities are the greatest artifacts of man, containers of collective myths and desires. STUDIO V explores and renews cities by creating contemporary architecture that incorporates and enriches history while expressing the ideals of our time.
Our designs combine old and new, integrate modern architecture with historic structures, and contrast craft and digital fabrication. Our research reveals historic layers of sites and structures while our architecture incorporates the radical recycling of industrial and historic artifacts including bridges, tanks, warehouses, buildings, former secret laboratories, and grain silos into surprising new uses and successful public spaces.
Our architecture addresses the forgotten spaces of cities, to support entrepreneurs, reconnect neighborhoods, and promote equity. Our expertise in resiliency, affordable housing, waterfront design, public parks, brownfield remediation, reinventing infrastructure, and cultural spaces is transforming former edges into the new centers of urban life.
Our architectural designs incorporate expressive lattice shells, cable-nets, state of the art sustainable materials, and innovative solutions to save endangered historic structures. Our innovative approaches to digital fabrication are transforming public spaces, from an award winning underground street in Japan, to the longest bar in North America, to a pedestrian passage on a bridge over Niagara Falls.
This year’s runner up is From Ruins to City by filmmaker Jake Catalanotto. The film presents the Buffalo grain elevators that once fueled the growth of the city as a place of connection for the local community and an experiment in creating a sustainable American city.
Watch our submission - From Ruins to City - AIA Film Challenge 2020
Jay Valgora, FAIA, Cornell University alum and founder of STUDIO V Architecture, is an example of someone seeing this process through end to end. STUDIO V has been producing thousands of PPE visor units, and Valgora has personally biked them across the East River with his son Jesse, an architecture student at Syracuse University.
In March, only a few days before the world came to a screeching halt, the City of Providence released a request for proposals. Months later, facing a global pandemic, an economic crisis and an explosive civil rights movement, it has become clear that a significant opportunity has landed at the city’s feet; a seemingly standard project to redesign and unify the downtown’s public spaces now seems remarkably prescient.