Crafted by Place

OGA’s place-based approach reshapes vernacular forms — distorting, bending, extruding, and misaligning them. A cabin becomes a lookout caught in mist; a restaurant glows like a lantern inside a banal box; a coastal path grows from rock like ancient lichen. Familiar yet transformed, these works are acts of making that honour materials, traditions, and the specificity of each place while carrying them somewhere new.

The exhibition reflects OGA’s pursuit of architecture free to evolve with place - to endure extremes and find intimacy in raw edges and rough ground. Buildings adapt to winds, weather, and shifting climates — not merely surviving, but surprising, delighting, and belonging all at once.

Sustainability is central to this ethos: listening to the land, shaping buildings that endure by working with their environments. Grounded in local materials and traditional methods reimagined through contemporary craft, OGA’s explorations in social housing, collaboration, and community reveal a practice as socially rooted as it is imaginative all while sheltering, serving, and continuing to provoke and delight.

Through drawings, models, sketches, and glimpses of built and speculative works — spanning cultural buildings, rural refuges, and small objects — Crafted by Place invites Berlin audiences into a refined, rugged, and quietly radical practice. Architecture here is emotional and elemental; details are precise yet wild; and the whole insists the best design does not conform — it adapts, elevates, and lives.

Canadian Douglas-fir ‘trees,’ CNC-milled by Spearhead into six- to nine-foot timber columns, articulate a shifting topography within the gallery. This temporary landscape unfolds before a 13’ tall image of the Lookout at Peggy’s Cove, printed by FOTOREKLAME, and a finely crafted European maple scale model of the project by Gonzalez Modellbau. The model rests within a sculptural terrain of mosses and grasses in hues ranging from deep green to soft beige, created by the Berlin-based floral atelier EMBLOSS. The botanical composition complements the Douglas-fir forms and evokes the tactile, sensorial qualities of the Canadian landscape. Together, these elements foster a dialogue between architecture and place — a space both grounded and carefully composed.

Omar Gandhi founded the eponymous practice in 2010 in Halifax. In 2016 the studio expanded to Toronto and recently opened their Berlin office in 2025. The firm has received prestigious honors including the Canada Council’s Professional Prix de Rome, the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices Award, and a Governor General’s Medal in Architecture. In 2018, Gandhi served as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale School of Architecture and was made a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Association of Canada in 2022. The studio is currently engaged in projects including the Riverbend Library in Edmonton, Alberta; the Outlier Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and the Adams Residence in St. John’s, Newfoundland.