“It’s been an incredible couple of years; a lot has changed,” says Brian Wickersham, Founding Partner of Los Angeles-based AUX Architecture.

When Teulo last sat down with Brian in 2022, AUX had just completed work on the Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Centre, and the team was in the process of settling into their new multi-disciplinary space, The Art Room. “We moved in while The Art Room was still in construction, and it’s been amazing to see it fully realised through the AUX studio and through the energy of the gallery, where there are now openings every couple of months. The space also includes a busy restaurant and has become a catalyst for the neighbourhood, hosting lots of events for both artists and the council district.”

In particular, Brian is excited to see The Art Room being used for social good. “We recently hosted the 2024 Congressional Art Competition, which featured submissions from over 110 high school students across California’s 37th District. We awarded five scholarships and chose a winner whose work will be displayed at the US Capitol building. We have also strongly prioritised collaboration with non-profits, including Disability Rights Now, whom we supported in the realisation of Bold Beauty Project LA. This powerful exhibition celebrated women with disabilities through large-scale photographs that were sold as part of a fundraiser to support Disability Rights Now.”

The AUX team is nearing completion on another performing arts space, a 240-seat black box theatre employing adaptive reuse principles to convert an old prop house once used for Gone with the Wind. “Wende Centre is very much a bookend to both the pandemic and the Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Centre,” Brian says. “We signed the contract the first week that we were working remotely, which made it one of the most challenging design processes of my career. It really highlighted the benefits of collaboration, iteration and communication, and seeing it realised has been so rewarding.

“Wende is the public-facing inversion of the conceptual work we did at the Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Centre; those two projects live together in my mind. With the latter, the structure is obscured, giving you a sense that there is something more going on behind it, and as you move to the interior of the theatre, you reach the warm heart, the living room of this campus. It’s analogous to the struggles of the autistic children for whom the space was designed. Conversely, at Wende Centre, the veil has been lifted. All of the rhythm and structure are on full display.”

The AUX team has also been further sharpening their sustainability practices, Brian says. “We’re increasingly focused on the consideration of environment and sustainability at the very start of each design process. We built a custom calculator and went back and reviewed 17 years of AUX projects to calculate the embodied carbon for each one. We were pleased to learn that our strategies have resulted in 13% less embodied carbon within our projects; we’ve also diverted 12,000 metric tonnes of waste from landfills and avoided 18,000,000 KgCo2e in emissions. Because of that exercise, we now have a lot of data and tools to utilise throughout our design process. Our perspective is that every project can be adaptive reuse or transformative restoration, and we’re always looking at what we can reutilise or divert and what immediate returns we can get from a carbon perspective.”

Brian is also passionately pursuing multiple projects in the multi-family and low-income housing space, an area of the practice that he says can be especially challenging. “This is where I see us having the biggest impact due to the major housing crisis in California. We’re delivering low-income housing for rent and multi-family projects as a path to homeownership by subsidising people who would otherwise not be able to have homes of their own. As a studio, we’ve got 500-600 apartments in development, many with non-profits. But we’re facing a huge battle with the banks and the lending markets. Projects that were already really hard to make, in the last couple of years, have become painfully difficult to get into construction.

“You have to be tenacious and unrelenting. We’re doing a lot of creative thinking by connecting unrelated projects to create economies of scale and get them funded. We also have to be increasingly pragmatic about design - a descriptor that really needs to apply to more designers - through our decision-making, like how we can set floor-to-ceiling heights so that they match available lengths of framing members, meaning that the timber we use never has to be touched by a saw. I now know more about finance than I ever wanted to know, but those are the battles you have to fight, especially for neighbourhoods and communities.”

Brian is excited about some big projects that AUX has in the works for 2025 and beyond. “Some of them we can’t share yet, but I can say that we’ve just started construction on a renovation of an iconic hotel on the Sunset Strip". We’re working on a medical clinic offering free vision care for kids in need in the Los Angeles community, and we have a lot of multi-family housing in progress for low-income earners. We’re also expanding geographically with another performing arts project and another hospitality project, both of which will enable us to expand our studio footprint outside of LA.”

Looking back on our chat in 2022, Brian describes that period as an inflection point that set AUX on a very different trajectory, one that would not have been possible without the unwavering support and expertise of his team. “It hasn’t been a perfect journey. It’s been hard at times, but each success has led to more. That’s a message that I think is important for young architects: you have to put in the time and the work to build your studio and hold the ideals that are important to you. You don’t need an established path to get started; you just have to stick with it and surround yourself with good people who work hard and care and believe in what you’re doing. None of this happens alone. There are so many in this team who deserve so much credit. That’s how you get this stuff done, period.”

To learn more and connect with Brian, visit https://auxarchitecture.com/ and follow AUX Architecture on LinkedIn and Instagram.