Taking Apart

AW–ARCH is an award-winning architecture practice based in Cambridge, MA, founded in 1992. Their work ranges from houses and cultural buildings to research-driven installations, and is widely recognised for its precise detailing, material intelligence, and conceptual clarity. Taking Apart: An Incomplete Catalog of AW–ARCH is the first comprehensive monograph on the work of founding principals Alex Anmahian and Nick Winton and their team. Structured as a taxonomic exploration, it arranges more than three decades of projects into thematic chapters — Figure/Object, Light/Shadow, Material/Assembly, and Shell/Liner— revealing the conceptual threads that run through the firm’s houses, observatories, boathouses, cultural spaces, and urban interventions. Drawn from the studio’s extensive archive, the book features some 300 photographs, plans, and drawings and offers reflections on process, materiality, and the sensory and spatial ambitions of AW-ARCH. Essays and project texts describe how their work emerges from an exacting engagement with site, program, and construction, resulting in architecture that is simultaneously rigorous, inventive, and deeply attuned to experience.