TETRA ATELIER is an interdisciplinary design lab that studies each project across scales, from the building as a whole down to a single joinery.

We believe a building is only as honest as the hand that built it, only as legible as the process that made it, and only as useful as its capacity to keep serving people long after we have left the site.

The hand behind a project matters to us as much as the mind behind it. We are drawn to what a finished project typically leaves unnoticed — the craftspeople, the fabrication methods, the sequence by which a drawing becomes a wall, a joint, a room. Design and construction are treated here as reciprocal practices, each shaping the other in the doing: to understand how a wall is built is already to reason about how it is designed, and the reverse holds equally.

Ornament and structure, to us, are not separate categories awaiting reconciliation, but a single problem viewed at different resolutions. A stair tread, a hinge, a reveal between two materials — these are never applied after the fact; they are where the building's logic becomes legible. The same holds where old fabric meets new: rather than smooth a seam into invisibility, we let it read as a seam, so a building's history stays legible in its present tense. When the same hand that draws a detail is accountable for its fabrication, concept and construction stop being two acts and become a single, indivisible operation of making, and a motif ceases to be a stylistic gesture, becoming instead a discipline enforced by the material itself.

Kristen Wu | Principal

Kristen manages the development logistics, property acquisition, and project coordination at Tetra. Before starting the studio, she worked in brokerage at Sotheby’s International Realty and directed construction initiatives at Atlantis Group. She holds a B.S. in Architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an M.S. in Real Estate Development from Columbia University GSAPP.

Bianca Lin | Principal

Bianca is an architectural designer and maker focused on detailing, model making, and fabrication. Her work spans multiple scales, from spatial design to custom objects. She has worked with design teams and architecture offices in Taipei, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, developing a strong interest in construction methods. Bianca holds a B.Arch from California College of the Arts and an M.Arch from Columbia University GSAPP.

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office@tetra-atelier.com
@tetraatelier

TETRA ATELIER

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