TERROIR emerged from a series of conversations in regard to the potential for architecture to open up questions of cultural significance in relation to the contemporary world.   

 

We are interested in how architecture mediates what were traditional cultural relationships between people - and between people and their world - in a globalised condition where the flow of finance and ideas fundamentally questions the very idea of cultural boundaries. 

 

It is the view of TERROIR that in this interconnected global circumstance, architecture cannot rely on a fixed and singular cultural condition but needs to engage with complex interconnected and overlapping systems.

 

Therefore, an effective role architecture can play in this context is to ask questions of those relationships and to make propositions about those gathered in any one project.  We ask these questions via a rigorous research process which commences every new project.  Specific research generates a body of knowledge particular to each project, making each new project unique in some way.

 

For TERROIR, this architectural project includes the discussions, lectures, research, exhibitions and explorations that work through the issues relevant to each project.  Thus we believe that the practice of architecture is the production of knowledge. 

 

Each individual project and client benefits from this intense knowledge generation process and is part of a continuous knowledge generation and deployment cycle.