Min | Day

Founded in 2000 by E.B. Min and Jeffrey L. Day, Min | Day is a multi-disciplinary design practice with studios in San Francisco, California and Omaha, Nebraska. Because we resist specialization, our work ranges from institutional projects to residential and furniture design. Rather than looking to a particular building type, we seek projects with potential for innovation in methodologies of practice, materials and fabrication and programming. Our approach privileges an evolving process that searches for unique opportunities hidden in the facts of the project at hand. These efforts often lead to explorations of the limits of American "kit-of-parts" methods of production. We are particularly interested in combining knowledge of vernacular building methods and conventional forms of standardization with advanced digitally-controlled production systems. This emphasis on alternative building systems often asserts sustainable materials and practices; however, we do not choose to work from a rigid theoretical position or to adopt an ideological approach to design. Instead, we prefer to take a flexible, tactical approach that deals with immediate circumstances and in particular, those concerned with notions of site and program. Consequently we are frequently engaged in work with landscapes both urban and rural. With each new project we attempt to build flexible spaces that remain open to the improvisations of everyday life. As designers, we often forego rigid formal order to allow more responsive organizational systems that can accommodate the circumstances of inhabitation. At times, our projects reference familiar modernist systems but locate points of flexibility and instability within presumably fixed orders. A variety of recent projects have provided opportunities to explore prefabrication, sustainable practices (using straw bale and other local waste products), landscape, art practice, and interior environments as integral facets of the architectural endeavor. We place a particular emphasis on art-related and not-for-profit commissions. Predominant in all of our projects is an attempt to coax specificity out of the generic and contingent identities bound up in the sites where we work.