Dima Grebenkin

Most projects, in my experience, begin long before anyone calls them projects. A house can live in someone's head for years, redrawn now and then; a studio can spend just as long wondering what the new tools mean for its way of working.

I've spent about twenty years around this early stage, first as an architect in Moscow and later in New York with Gensler and Kiewit, and somewhere along the way I noticed that helping things get started, and then keeping them on course, is the part of the work I understand best.

The practice has two sides, which I think of as two stances of the same mind. D—GR, or Design Ground, is the making side: houses, interiors, masterplans, concepts. DG—R, Design Ground Research, is where I think and write about how design itself is changing, from the daily craft to what AI is doing to the process. The two feed each other in a fairly practical way, since whatever I learn on real projects ends up in the writing, and the thinking finds its way back into the work.

In both cases things usually start with a conversation, and the point of that conversation is to leave you with a plan: a clear sense of what you're building and what to do first. The rest tends to follow from there.