A MINNEAPOLIS-BASED ARCHITECTURE FIRM
Who We Are and What We Do
Charlie Lazor is the Principal and design team leader at Lazor/Office, founded in 2003.
Charlie received his BA from Williams College and graduated from Yale School of Architecture in 1993. In 1996, after gaining experience at the offices of Gray Organschi Architecture and Roth & Moore Architects, he co-founded the award-winning furniture design company Blu Dot with the goal of making modern design more widely accessible. This is reflected in Lazor/Office's attention to detail and emphasis on how buildings are put together. The office design philosophy places primacy on “place making” - developing a sensitive, integrated architectural response to make the natural and the man made one, to experience site and space holistically. We begin with a rigorous study and analysis of your site’s specific composition: the obvious and the not so obvious, the views, the light, the breezes, the climate. We study and analyze your program; how you want to live, work, play. We investigate materials that are ecologically responsible, responsive to the site conditions, support your program and reflect who you are and your sensibility. We seek to synthesize all of this such that the outcome appears obvious, inevitable. Architecture is put into the service of making place, for us.
Charlie is actively involved in academia, teaching and lecturing at the local and international level. He is Professor in Practice of Architecture and former Cass Gilbert Chair at the University of Minnesota College of Design. In dialogue with his practice, his studios engage manufactured building systems. Charlie has also taught at the University of Michigan as the Max Fish Visiting Chair and at the University of Arizona. He has been an invited juror at schools including Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California at Berkeley, and lectured extensively on the firm’s work at institutions including Harvard, Yale and RISD.
The work of Lazor/Office has been published in Dwell, The New York Times, Newsweek, and Time as well as in books published by Taschen, Rizzoli, DAAD, and Phaidon. Lazor/Office was chosen for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Triennial in 2006, and Charlie was a finalist for RISD's Athena Award for emerging designers in 2005. The firm's work has been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Building Museum; Walker Art Center; Vancouver Art Gallery; and Yale School of Architecture.
Free time is spent fly fishing, playing ice hockey and considering which vintage motorcycle to buy next.
