About (me)
I hail from a small southern town that sits a stone’s throw from the Savannah River, the natural boundary that separates South Carolina from Georgia. Growing up in the Iodine State, I was often surrounded by those structures that are considered rural vernacular, typologies such as farmhouses, old churches, plantations, and every degree of shed. Weathered brick, aged wood, and the patina of exposed metal became things of value and things that felt close to where I had come from. There was also something comfortable about being surrounded by this material candor.
I stayed in the south, for a while. At the College of Charleston, I double-majored in Historic Preservation/Community Planning and Art History. Next, a Master of Architecture from the Savannah College of Art Design. After the financial crisis of 2008, I found myself on a plane headed to Shanghai where I would start my architectural career. For the past 13 years, I have worked and lived in places that range from China to the Hamptons, from India to Bangladesh, and also Taiwan. I even lived in a Kathmandu monastery in between visa disputes. I sought out studios that find value in examining their own vernacular context and infusing it with expressions of modern sensibilities that are both grounded and appropriate. This experience includes internationally renowned architects such as Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, Zhang Ke of ZAO/standardarchitecture, and Pritzker Prize Laureate B.V. Doshi. Each studio was challenging in its own right, yet each further reinforced my interest in an architecture that is expressive yet restrained, beautiful yet raw in its embrace of texture, light, and silence. During my time at these aetliers, my portfolio expanded to include commercial, civic, and high-end residential. On the domestic side, I have been working for the office of Oza Sabbeth Architects in Bridgehampton, New York primarily on single-family modern vacation homes. After co-founding a small studio in the Hamptons, I decided to move forward with a sole proprietorship which has become Brad Hooks design office.
BH_do is a Long Island-based international design studio. The focus of this endeavor is to initiate an iterative design process to best facilitate an architecture that is rooted in place and representative of modernist principles. BH_do is seeking to produce simple and thoughtful buildings that are in dialogue with their surroundings, natural or built, and are activated by the sensorial and emotive qualities of their materials. This studio is integrative and works with multiple disciplines across national borders, a reflection of the many relationships formed and the diverse skillset obtained from over a decade of rigorous practice. It is, in a sense, a continued pursuit of an architecture that has always been around me in some form: an understanding that weathered brick, aged wood, and the patina of exposed metal are beautiful things that represent not only where I come from, but where I’ve been since leaving that small southern town.
Collaborators: Mark Thackrah Architecture, Sea Lodge Architecture, CREO, Atelier Nasr Hyd, Hua Yunsi, Shizhen Geng, Xi (Kerry) Zhou, Juncong Lu, Tyler Russell, Christoper Beckcom, Christopher Patrick, Ver3D