PLY Architecture is the collaborative design studio of Craig Borum and Karl Daubmann. The practice has attempted to strike a balance between client commissions, PLY initiated projects through funded research, and design competitions. PLY is both as a business and an extension of our roles as educators, thinkers, makers, mentors, and designers.

PLY has served as a framework to confront the often-conflicting relationships among the needs and desires of clients commissioning the work, the exigencies of site and program, economic constraints, construction logics, and the responsibility to advance the discipline of architecture. Our goal has always been to design responsively such that we satisfy the demands of our clients, and the public at large.

PLY is inspired by Detroit (and the broader region) and the optimism embodied in its history of industrialized mass-production to reduce costs and provide a product of consistently high quality to a broad segment of the public. At the same time, we guard against the singularity of industrial efficiency that produces monotonous banality through thoughtless repetition. Our work feeds off this conflict in a number of ways. At the largest scale, we seek to establish meaningful relationships between our buildings and the spatial structures of the landscape. At the scale of the building, we have taken on ubiquitous manufactured building systems and attempted to work within the logics of these systems to propose new assemblies, yielding unexpected spatial effects and configurations. At the detail scale, we have employed techniques of industrial fabrication to produce crafted surfaces from pre-manufactured materials. Our work challenges assumptions of economies of construction, enriches sensual experience, and resists the reductive aesthetics of market-driven architecture. We question the assumption that availability and low-cost must inevitably lead to a banal and repetitive built environment.

We have made a concerted effort to not only practice but to test various modes of practice, all in service of producing better work for a broader range of clients and building inhabitants. True innovation in form, space or material is not possible unless one questions the mode and relationships of the practice. We have entered numerous national and international competitions as a means of disciplinary speculation. We have operated as architect in a traditional set of relationships working between client and contractor. We have built many projects through direct engagement of materials and tools. We have collaborated in multidisciplinary teams and worked directly for contractors in larger design-build teams. We have secured research funding to test specific ideas related to the profession. We have built gallery installations to gain valuable material insight for future work. We have designed products and their manufacturing processes. We have done product development work for prefab housing manufacturers. We teach, lecture, and operate as critics. Over the last 11 years we have employed 52 aspiring architects, most of whom are our former students.

PLY has built over 60 projects of varying scale and complexity. These projects have been recognized by the profession and academy. The work has earned a commendation from AR+D Awards for Emerging Architecture from the Architectural Review, 2 R+D Awards from Architect Magazine, and American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design, a National AIA Award, six State of Michigan American Institute of Architect (AIA) awards, a Wood Design Award, an ID (International Design) Award, a Merit Prize from the Shinkenchiku-sha Central Glass Competition, an ACSA Faculty Design Award, and an Urban Design First Prize at the XV Pan-American Biennale. Selected as one of six participants in the Architecture League of New York’s Young Architects Forum (2006) and as one of “101 of the World’s Most Exciting New Architects” by Wallpaper* Magazine (2007). The work has been published in numerous national and international publications.