Research & Development (R&D)

Research isn’t a department at UFO — it’s how we work. Our R&D operates at the meeting point of practice, teaching and research, designing environments and systems that sit at the leading edge of the discipline. We bring architectural design together with educational and research objectives, developing materials, methods and spaces through interdisciplinary collaboration rather than in isolation.

Much of this happens in close partnership with educators, researchers and institutions, so that what we design serves both real-world ambition and rigorous enquiry. By keeping design, teaching and research in constant exchange, we create knowledge-driven work that inspires invention, supports technological advance and pushes sustainable development forward.

Live projects with academia

Some of our most valuable work takes the form of live projects — real briefs, real sites and real constraints, pursued in collaboration with universities and their students. A live project is the point where teaching stops being theoretical: an idea is designed, prototyped and often built, then tested against the unforgiving reality of materials, budgets and weather. We’ve used this model to design and realise public pavilions and built prototypes, and it benefits everyone involved — students gain genuine experience, research gains a testing ground, and the resulting architecture carries ideas that a conventional commission would rarely risk. It’s also how invention reaches the public realm quickly, at one-to-one scale.

Interdisciplinary research

The hardest problems in architecture don’t respect disciplinary boundaries, so neither do we. We assemble research constellations that bring together architects, engineers, material scientists, computational designers, fabricators and ecologists around a shared question. Working across fields this way is what allows a structural idea, a material breakthrough and an environmental strategy to develop as one line of enquiry rather than three separate ones — and it’s where the most original results come from.

Where our research is focused

Our R&D concentrates on four connected fronts:

  • Computation — generative and parametric design methods that let us explore, test and optimise thousands of design options against real performance criteria, turning analysis into form.
  • Digital fabrication — robotic and CNC manufacture that translates computational design directly into physical components with a precision and complexity that hand methods can’t reach.
  • New materials — researching and testing materials, with a particular focus on mass timber and other low-carbon, bio-based systems, for performance, durability and environmental impact.
  • New forms of construction — developing methods such as prefabrication, modular assembly and design for disassembly, so buildings go up faster, waste less and can be taken apart and reused at the end of their life.

Regenerative and ecological design

Underlying all of it is a conviction that architecture must give back more than it takes. We work on regenerative and ecological design — buildings and systems that don’t merely reduce harm but actively repair, storing carbon, supporting biodiversity, and working with natural cycles of light, water and air rather than against them. Sustainability is the floor; regeneration is the ambition. It’s the question every strand of our research ultimately serves: how architecture can become part of the planet’s recovery, not its depletion.