Public space is where civic engagement takes place, the foundation of how a metropolitan democracy works.
Hunt Laudi Studio: Architects in Washington, DC since 2001, formed by our ten years in Barcelona during the Spanish democratic transition from the Franco dictatorship, where the architects led the renovation of the city and its connective tissue, public space, streets, parks, plazas and the waterfront. We hold that the architect's duty to the city ranks above simple return on investment and we have spent twenty years balancing the public good with private interests.
Beneath Dupont Circle lies a streetcar station abandoned in 1962. We spent years arguing it was worth saving, founded the Dupont Underground, and made architecture part of its public programming, including the series Architecture and the Question of Democracy. It now draws roughly 40,000 visitors a year.
In 2014 we proposed capping the Connecticut Avenue underpass, a "Cap Park" stitching Dupont Circle's main street back together. The District is now building the "Deckover" on that site. We were not the design architects of what is under construction; we were among those who put the idea on paper and in front of the public.
Legacy Memorial Park honors the nine people killed in the 2009 Red Line Metro collision. With sculptor Barbara Liotta, we won the open competition held by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Department of General Services. The park opened at the site on June 22, 2015.
Houses, rowhouse renovations, accessory dwelling units, condominiums, a tenants' cooperative, gardens, cultural spaces, the daily work of a practice that treats every project, private or public, as part of the same city. See the work.
701 K St. NE Co-op: Renovation of a classic Art Deco apartment building in Design Development phase. 18 units modernized with the latest HVAC technology, solar roof panels, new kitchens and bathrooms. The Cooperative was created to allow tenants to exercise their rights under the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) and acquire their building. We enjoyed meeting all the tenants and listening to their stories.
Logan Circle ADU: Replaced a deteriorated shack/garage on the alley behind the house with a double-height garage with a car lift and an ADU apartment above. The codes had not yet allowed Accessory Dwelling Units but we obtained a special exception in anticipation of the rule change.
Julian Hunt: jhunt@huntlaudistudio.com
Lucrecia Laudi: llaudi@huntlaudistudio.com
A memorial won in open competition: a sacred grove for the nine lives, near the site of the 2009 Metro collision.
On June 22, 2009, two Red Line trains collided near Fort Totten — the deadliest crash in Metro's history. Nine people were killed. The city needed a place of memory near the site.
Nine individual sculptural artworks — one for each life — stand in a carefully designed landscape setting, with a memorial wall carrying an inscription written by the victims' families.
The families were given the words; the design gives them a memorial.
The ancient impulse to commemorate is the origin of the sacred grove, where an exceptional event, often long forgotten, becomes transmuted into a destination where succeeding generations can find solace. As such, we propose a sacred grove to commemorate the nine victims of the accident as a place that can also re-weave these broken threads of the surrounding urban fabric.
The branches of the nine trees are woven together using pleaching, an old technique in which neighboring branches are trained and grafted to one another until they fuse, a process known as inosculation. Over time the nine trees grow into a single continuous canopy.
Images 1–3 and 5–6 from the conceptual design presentation to the DC Commission of Fine Arts, April 8, 2014. Barbara Liotta, sculptor; Hunt Laudi Studio, architecture and urban design.
A memorial commissioned by the city, won in open competition, and built — proof that the competition culture we argue for can produce serious public space in Washington.
An Italian/Lebanese couple had moved to the city and brought up two kids at a house they never felt was theirs. Once the kids went to college, they asked us to transform the house more to their tastes and were very happy to finally have a house they felt was their own at last.
The couple have since retired and moved to Rome. When they put the house up for sale, it sold immediately to a neighbor, who called it the best-designed house in the neighborhood.
An architect couple newly arrived in the city asked us to renovate a run-down rowhouse. A complete gut/rehab, we were given free rein to push the materials to maximize the design impact within the confines of a very restrictive preservation regime.
A gut/rehab of the main floor for a couple working at the World Bank with design elements drawn from middle eastern heritage.
We did the concept drawings after being invited by a Korean-American artist, and visited Seoul to research traditional garden pavilions.
A complete gut/rehab with a set back third floor addition and roof deck with lots of light for a gardener.
A second home within your home — designed, not just added. We replaced a deteriorated shack/garage on the alley behind the house with a double-height garage with a car lift and an ADU apartment above. The codes had not yet allowed Accessory Dwelling Units, but we obtained a special exception in anticipation of the rule change.
A former head of the DC Office of Planning asked us to renovate his house with a rooftop addition and a guest house/office/ADU. A prominent corner house on the top of a hill with great views of the city, our client was ready to push the boundaries with a more daring exterior design while making the interior a place for an active social life.
Two-unit condo on an exceptionally narrow 12′ × 100′ lot.
One of our associates at the time was gaining a social media following for her clothing design so we developed an incubator in an unused retail space.
The Argentina Ambassador at the time asked Lucrecia to design a more welcoming arrival space so we converted a waiting area to an introduction to Argentine culture.
Art Deco renovation for the tenants' TOPA limited-equity cooperative; 18 units; in Design Development.
Three tones of Ironspot brick with stamped stainless projections.
A commercial client asked us to protect the view from his backyard from a possible "megamansion" on a property up the hill. We designed a sophisticated gut/rehab that held the original volume of the house.
An undulating, green-roofed pavilion over the Connecticut Avenue underpass inspired by the Santa Caterina Market in Barcelona.
North of Dupont Circle, Connecticut Avenue drops into an underpass that splits the neighborhood's main street in two. In 2014 the District's capital budget for fiscal 2015 set aside $10 million to build a pedestrian deck over it, between the circle and Q Street.
We proposed covering the new plaza with an undulating, green-roofed pavilion: a public room open on all sides, where a market, a café table or a crowd can gather under one roof. The idea came from the Santa Caterina Market in Barcelona, designed by our friends Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue at EMBT, where a rolling roof turned a neighborhood market into a civic landmark.
By creating a public space under a green roof, we wanted to shade the hard surface of the "Deckover" bridge engineering.
"D.C.'s planned 'cap park' will take time"
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post, July 23, 2014
Hunt Laudi Studio "has proposed an undulating, green-roofed pavilion for the plaza."
The District is now building the "Deckover" on this site. We were not the design architects of what is under construction; we were among those who put the idea on paper and in front of the public.
Competition entry. One of six finalists in the National Ideas Competition for the Washington Monument Grounds.
Beneath Dupont Circle
Streetcar station abandoned in 1962; the studio founded the cultural institution; ~40,000 visitors a year
Connecticut Avenue underpass
"Cap Park" proposal inspired by the Santa Caterina Market in Barcelona. The District is now building a plaza there
South Dakota & New Hampshire Aves NE
Memorial to the nine killed in the 2009 Red Line collision, with sculptor Barbara Liotta
Beneath Dupont Circle
Beneath Dupont Circle lie two streetcar platforms and their tunnels, 75,000 square feet in all, opened in November 1949 and abandoned in 1962 when the District retired its streetcars. The space served as a fallout shelter in the late 1960s and a short-lived food court in the 1990s, then sat empty. Julian Hunt found it in the early 2000s, back in Washington after a decade in Barcelona, where architects and artists had helped remake the city. With Lucrecia Laudi he founded the Arts Coalition for the Dupont Underground, which won the District's request for proposals in 2010 and signed a lease in 2014. Dupont Underground opened to the public in 2016 with the installation "Raise/Raze" and was named Nonprofit of the Year by the Washington Business Journal. It remains a venue for art, architecture, and performance below one of the city's great public spaces.
Twenty years of building the city at every scale — accessory dwelling units, houses, cooperatives, condominiums, gardens, memorials and cultural spaces.
Essays, films and competition entries — the studio thinking in public.
"The Washington Monument re-imagined," The Washington Post, November 27, 2011 · Read the article (PDF)
Otto Dix: Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926).
Urban Land, August 2008 · Read the article (PDF)
We understand architecture as a common good and a human right — a discipline inseparable from the fundamental right to inhabit, belong, and participate in the places we share. Our work seeks to connect architecture, landscape, and city as parts of a continuous territory shaped by culture, politics, and collective life. We approach each project as a dialogue between memory, place, and transformation: recognizing what already exists, understanding the forces that have formed it, and imagining how design can open new possibilities. Architecture, for us, is not simply the production of buildings but the creation and stewardship of places that support dignity, access, identity, and collective well-being.
Civic duty ranks above the client's return on investment — the Vitruvian Oath. We formed this conviction in Barcelona, and we have argued it in Washington for twenty years.
Hunt Laudi Studio was established in 2001 by Julian Hunt, joined in 2005 by Lucrecia Laudi, after ten years abroad in Barcelona. Our work is influenced by that immersion in neo-modern minimalism mixed with the very old. We work to transform our clients' intangible ideals into real projects, and can offer design/build as an alternative to hiring a contractor. We are hands-on, with years of experience working with craftsmen, tradesmen, and laborers to craft a building from the myriad materials needed to assemble the finished form.
With over twenty years in our own practice and previous experience in large-scale international projects with Venturi Scott Brown, Ricardo Bofill's Taller de Arquitectura, Leo A Daly, and HOK, we are well aware of the balance of cost, complexity, quality, and time in a project.
Lucrecia Laudi is an architect and urban designer whose practice is grounded in a conviction formed early in her training: that design can advance dignity, inclusion, and the fundamental right to the city.
She received her Diploma in Architecture from the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in Argentina and continued her studies at the University of Pennsylvania, earning master’s degrees in Architecture and City Planning, with certificates in Urban Design and Appropriate Technologies for Development. Her graduate work included design and field research in India and Italy.
In Barcelona, she practiced at Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura during the city’s period of democratic transition and urban transformation, contributing to master planning, urban-design, and public-realm projects in Spain and France.
Returning to the United States, she served as a senior designer on large-scale national and international commissions at Leo A Daly and HOK in Washington, DC. In 2005, she joined Julian Hunt as partner at Hunt Laudi Studio, an interdisciplinary practice working across architecture, urbanism, and civic engagement.
She is a co-founder of Dupont Underground, a nonprofit cultural platform at the intersection of art, architecture, and public space, a case of adaptive reuse of an abandoned streetcar station beneath Dupont Circle. She has served the organization as Board Member, Board Chair, and Advisory Board Member, shaping its programming and cultivating a network of local and international collaborators. She curated two of the four exhibitions in its series Architecture and the Question of Democracy: Common Ground, Common Future: Reimagining the Heart of the District and Miró and Sert: Art, Architecture and Resistance. She also serves on the Design Committee of Historic Dupont Circle Main Streets.
Born in Connecticut, thirty miles from New Haven, where the first Hunt landed as an indentured servant in 1639, Julian studied architecture at Rice University and the University of Virginia. On completing his Master's, he went to work in Barcelona, where he met Lucrecia Laudi and witnessed the critical role architects played in the formation of municipal democratic institutions after forty years of dictatorship. As lead designer at Ricardo Bofill's Taller de Arquitectura his work included the urban expansion of Andorra and a new municipal park in Vigo, Spain, transforming an industrial wasteland. He was joint winner of the Thyssen Architecture Prize for a new urban plaza in the Barrio Gótico of Barcelona, wrote architectural criticism for Metropolis, Design Book Review, and Arquitectura Viva, and was the playwright of Iconópolis at the Festival Grec. The ten years were formative.
Returning to the United States in 1995, he worked on the urban area around the Cheung Kong Centre in Hong Kong and a re-conceptualization of Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires, before establishing the studio in 2001. A key project was the founding of the Dupont Underground — a cultural institution in an abandoned streetcar station, conceived to expand the understanding of what architects can contribute to public life. The driving concept was a direct expression of the democratic transition in Barcelona.
Write to us about a site, a building, or a public space.
1504 Swann Street NW, Washington, DC 20009
Julian Hunt: jhunt@huntlaudistudio.com
Lucrecia Laudi: llaudi@huntlaudistudio.com
A page that reads like an argument: one serif voice, a labelled margin, rules instead of boxes, and images sized to their evidence.
Newsreader carries every word the studio says — titles, arguments, essays. It is an optical-size serif built for long reading on screen, warm without being quaint, and it sets Barrio Gótico, Santa Caterina and Cultura Contemporània correctly. Instrument Sans handles only what is metadata: navigation, section labels, facts, captions, index lines.
White paper and near-black ink; one brick-oxide accent reserved for links, so a link reads as a link and nothing else competes. Drawings get a lighter ground. The draft-note ochre exists only until launch.
One grid on every page: a 160px label margin, a 640px reading column, and a free right column for figures. Page width 1200px, 48px gutters. An 8px scale — 8, 16, 24, 32, 48, 56, 72, 96 — with hairline rules doing the work boxes would otherwise do. Images never exceed the two content columns; a 1000px photograph is shown at 560px or less.
Name · place · year · one clause, on a single hairline. The name is the link; everything after it is set in the meta face so the list scans as a list.
