Inside a83, one of New York City’s few architectural galleries, personal and professional wires don’t just get crossed—they get tangled.

Founders Owen Nichols and Clara Syme run their design studio, Chibbernoonie, out of the gallery’s SoHo storefront. The couple share a small, efficient apartment at its rear with Busy, their frisky, wire-haired pup; in the adjacent office, a risograph printer resembling a copy machine spits out posters and proofs. In the basement, they have assembled a printshop from disparately procured equipment, including a jerry-rigged screen printing machine and an embosser. Down here also rests the a83 archive, which contains some 10,000 prints, proofs, and ephemera—much of it inherited from Owen’s father, printmaker John Nichols. He ran his gallery, John Nichols Printmakers (JNP), in the building from the late 1970s to 1994, before renting the space out to other gallerists. After taking the lease over in 2020, Owen and Clara returned the archive to 83 Grand Street, undid changes made by former tenants, and made their fair share of upgrades; a recent rewiring job—a gray conifer of cables Clara jokingly calls “our beautiful conduit tree”— sums up the snarly connections of their practice.

“We’re trying to replicate it as it was,” says Owen about having a83 channel the energy of when the space exhibited work by Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Albert Pope, and others. “Antoine Predock, the architect, filled the gallery with three cubic yards of sand. Jesse Reiser, of Reiser+Umemoto, did his first show here in 1987, and he and [partner] Nanako just exhibited with us. So it makes sense to foreground the history of this place against the new projects we’re doing.”

“Or maybe to ‘side-ground’ the history,” Clara adds, “so that the old and new work begin to run parallel to one another.”

The couple’s design office prefigured both their relationship and a83, cofounded with the curator and writer Phillip Denny (who has since left the gallery).

After completing his degree at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation in 2015, Owen moved back to his childhood home in Princeton, New Jersey, where his parents permanently relocated after having closed JNP, archive in tow. He built a custom fence for the Princeton property and began advertising his services to the neighbors. The fence-building soon led to beefier design commissions, including the Green Tile House, featured in Dwell’s November/December 2022 issue, which expands on an ’80s redesign of a midcentury prefab house. Owen preserved most of its playful period touches, while adding some of his own, most notably, an odd, but felicitous, choice in cladding: French Green terra-cotta tile, typically used as roofing material.

Inside, owners David and Rachel Mostafavi have hanged original drawings by Owen and Clara, who joined Chibbernoonie and the house project in 2019, playing a mostly managerial role. (Karen Nichols, Owen’s mother and a principal at Michael Graves Design, signed off on the construction documents.) Depicting the assembly of a feature wall, the drawings—part axonometric diagrams, part artworks—are indicative of the studio’s design process, which Owen likens to screen printing. “It’s stencil- or layer-based,” he says. “Not only has that influenced how we design—by pushing and pulling things apart—but also the way we see things.”

Layering, however, can lead to a false perception of flatness, particularly when obscuring the contributions made by individual members of design teams. With both Chibbernoonie and a83, Owen and Clara (a graduate of the Princeton School of Architecture) have settled into an equitable division of labor that plays to one another’s strengths. Here, too, they reference the mechanics of screen printing. “We found the term ‘chromist’ for me,” Clara says. “They’re responsible for separating colors from an image to prepare it for the physical work of printing, which Owen does.” The boundary between the two tasks is more fluid, Owen interjects, but the term nonetheless frames the partnership in ways the pair find endearing.

The insistence on flatness is partly polemical. Digital design has advanced to a point where “space” can be conjured in endlessly compelling and counterintuitive ways. What better tactic for distinguishing your upstart studio than to solidify a commitment to an analogue form—most indelibly, Chibbernoonie’s lovingly made dioramalike models—many architects still feel a strong attachment to? But this posture is also pragmatic, Owen says. “If we worked in a more sculptural way, we wouldn’t be able to store any of it, nor exhibit it, here. And that’s what we really want to do: continue growing the archive.”

Ensuring a constant turnover of exhibitions at a83 will help feed the archival impulse (discarded or rejected proofs of exhibited artworks are filed away for keeping), as would a churn of design commissions or competition submissions. On the latter front, Owen and Clara maintain a more artisanal pace. Apart from the Green Tile House, Chibbernoonie has realized just one standalone project, for a New Jersey apiary. They also finished a colorful cafe in a Chicago specialty-needs high school in 2019. Currently in the works are another Princeton home and a major renovation of the grounds of chez Nichols, plus several interior remodels. There’s hope that a slow-burning relationship with Elsewhere, a nightclub in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood with ambitions to expand to other cities, will soon pay off.

To the outside observer, the exacting work of printmaking would seem to habituate one to a certain frame of mind, perhaps even forced perspectives. But the actual work is more iterative, relying on intuition and experimentation as much as precise methodologies. “Things don’t always line up the way we want,” Clara says. Life—like collaborative work—is messier, and tanglier, than that.

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