PAU, legally Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, is a New York architecture and urban design firm led by Vishaan Chakrabarti and based at 19 West 34th Street in Manhattan. The practice works at the intersection of buildings and city-scale planning, with a portfolio spanning cultural institutions, transit and large mixed-use districts. PAU is design architect on the $135 million Rock and Roll Hall of Fame expansion in Cleveland, a 50,000-square-foot triangular building in black steel and specular granite that interlocks with I.M. Pei’s 1995 glass pyramid and lifts museum exhibition space by 40 percent. The firm won that commission through an invited global competition.
PAU publishes a list of the work it will not take. Suburban homes, malls and office parks are off the table, as are projects using indentured or slave labour, slot machine gambling establishments, arms manufacturing buildings, correctional facilities, and anything that irreparably damages the environment. Few architecture firms put that in writing on their own site.
What it does take is grouped under nine headings: cultural and institutional architecture, public space and infrastructure, housing and neighborhood planning, urban and campus design, spaces for the future of work and industry, progressive transit-oriented mixed use, project narrative and strategy, community engagement, climate innovation, and social impact advocacy. The practice describes itself as a group of thinkers who build, and its stated aim is architecture that connects people to culture, community and climate.
The project list bears out the range. Alongside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame expansion in Cleveland, PAU has produced Pennsylvania Station Renewed and the Penn Palimpsest study in Manhattan, The Refinery at Domino in Brooklyn, the Sunnyside Yard master plan in Queens, Hobson College at Princeton, the Wave Bridge in Indianapolis, InterOculus in Columbus, Indiana, the Wanamaker Building and both East and West Towers at Schuylkill Yards in Philadelphia, the JPMorgan Chase global headquarters in New York, a nationwide series of F4 airport traffic control towers for the FAA, and heritage gateway and downtown development strategies for Niagara Falls. Research and advocacy pieces such as Affordable New York, Better Sheds Ahead and The Goldilocks Module sit in the same portfolio as the buildings.
Vishaan Chakrabarti, FAIA FRAIC, founded the studio and serves as creative director. Before PAU he held principal roles at global firms, taught at Cornell and Columbia, and served as William Wurster Dean at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. As Michael Bloomberg’s director of planning for Manhattan after 9/11 he worked on the High Line, the World Trade Center rebuild, the No. 7 subway extension and the borough’s waterfronts. He has written two books, A Country of Cities (Metropolis Books, 2013) and The Architecture of Urbanity (Princeton University Press, September 2024).
The studio is at 19 West 34th Street, Suite 1010, New York, NY 10001, on 212 962 6307 or info@pau.studio.
