OFFSEA / office for socially engaged architecture
is a collaboration between London and Berlin. Architects Andrea Benze and Anuschka Kutz form the core of this otherwise open and cross-disciplinary network, founded in 2002. We engage in projects between architecture, social critique and art.

Why socially engaged architecture?
We believe that it is important to engage actively with the people for whom space is made, rather than abstracting them as “the user”, a term with unknown qualities. We use participation not as a brief to be directly implemented but as a research ground from which we elaborate, abstract, interpret and create. The aim is to generate a field of knowledge about personal needs, passions, habits and rituals with the aspiration to generate architecture and space that is inspired by and derives from everyday situations. At the core stands the simple question: how do people live?

Offsea works in practice and in theory, as an active research platform, creating architectural and urban projects. We use a variety of orthodox and unorthodox methods to establish both a critical framework as well as active architectural propositions. We put established working methods, rules and conventions of the architect to the test, adjusting and reformulating our role and rules.

Offsea reflects and manipulates the urban fabric, exploring relationships between micro and macro. We examine personal and individually lived space and the borderline between the built and imagined, and relating these insights back to more complex networks and systems influencing the urban condition. We undertake research in new technologies seeking to translate conceptual ideas into sustainable, affordable, low-key but nonetheless inventive and intelligent spaces.

We work in various alliances and with an unorthodox office structure operating from hotel rooms, kitchens, lecture halls, and cheap airlines or from wherever possible in space and time.

We welcome new ideas and collaborators.