Lagado Architects

LAGADO architects is a serious studio for playful architecture, focussing on human behaviour and social and physical interaction with the designed environment. It was founded in 2011 by architects Maria Vasiloglou and Victor Verhagen in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. We named our studio after The Grand Acadamy of Lagado, the University in the story of Gulliver's Travels where all the sciences are practiced in an unconventional way. The architect who is mentioned there tries to find out how to be able to build a house starting from the roof and working downward to the foundation. This inspires us to always question every convention and follow our own fascinations. A common line in our work is that we like to make spaces and objects with an ambiguous character, things that can be interpreted and used in multiple ways by different people or at different times in the day. We are interested in the way people make a space their own, how they relate to it and appropriate it. We like to make spaces that are like landscapes, places that invite you to explore and use your surroundings to your own needs. In this way, we look with the same interest at all parts of the designed environment, whether it is an object, a room, a building or a city. Therefore, we don't work with a style or predetermined ideas but seek to come up with an appropriate solution for each situation. We are interested in designing spaces that don't look back in sentiment but are a reaction to the present and a vision for the future. Our self-initiated and commissioned research and design projects contribute to the city of tomorrow today.