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"Architecture is the art of how to waste space beautifully."
Forma was founded in Oslo in 2001 by architects Elena Vasquez and Kenji Mori with a single conviction: that buildings should outlast their budgets, their briefs, and their architects. Twenty-four years later, that conviction remains unchanged.
It began with a warehouse. In the winter of 2001, Elena Vasquez and Kenji Mori took a lease on a derelict waterfront building in Oslo's Bjørvika district — before the neighbourhood was anything — and turned it into their studio. They had four employees, two commissions, and one rule: never design anything you wouldn't want to live inside.
Their first major project, the Sørenga Cultural Pavilion, won the Norwegian Architecture Prize in 2004 and established Forma's signature language: restrained material palettes, disciplined geometry, and an almost obsessive attention to how natural light moves through a space across the course of a single day.
Today Forma operates from four studios across Oslo, London, Tokyo, and Cape Town. The team of 62 includes architects, urban planners, conservationists, landscape designers, and researchers. The warehouse in Bjørvika is still our home base. The original rule still stands.
These are not values we invented. They are values we discovered — through difficult projects, honest failures, and the slow accumulation of twenty-four years of practice.