Believing architecture should actively empower its users—not simply be a representational art—REX challenges and advances building paradigms and promotes architecture's agency. Believing architecture should actively empower its users and communities—not simply be a representational art—REX challenges and advances building paradigms and promotes the agency of architecture. This ethos guides the studio’s aspiration to produce inventive designs so functionally specific that they offer new and inspiring aesthetic experiences. REX’s designers of varied cultural, social, and educational backgrounds are led by Founding Principal Joshua Ramus, FAIA, and Principals Alysen Hiller Fiore, Assoc. AIA; Adam Chizmar, AIA; and Raúl Rodríguez García, PhD, Int’l. Assoc. AIA. Recently completed work includes the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center in New York, New York, about which The New York Times architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman, raved, “Lower Manhattan could have hardly asked for a more spectacular work of public architecture;” The Lindemann Performing Arts Center at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, which, according to Sam Lubell in The New York Times, takes “theater architecture into new territory, pushing the notion of flexibility to its limits; to the point where you wonder if the whole idea of a theater—or any building for that matter—might be changing with it;” and 2050 M Street, a premium office building that hosts CBS’s Washington, DC bureau, which Josephine Minutillo, editor in chief of Architectural Record, declared “sits like a jewel in the city’s Golden Triangle business district.”
The firm’s work under design or construction includes a pair of mixed-use skyscrapers in Perth, Australia; two residential towers on the Brooklyn waterfront, as part of the redevelopment of the iconic Domino Sugar Factory site; a hybrid retail and cultural hub for Kia Motors in Seoul, South Korea; office towers in Brisbane, Australia and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; and the 4,050 m² (43,600 SF) Necklace Residence on Long Island, New York. Seminal projects in REX’s growth and continued advancement of architectural typologies include the AT&T Performing Arts Center Dee & Charles Wyly Theatre in Dallas, Texas; the Vakko Fashion Center & Power Media Headquarters in Istanbul, Turkey; and the Seattle Central Library in the State of Washington. Joshua led the Seattle Central Library—hailed by architecture critic Herbert Muschamp in The New York Times as “the most exciting new building it has been my honor to review in more than 30 years of writing about architecture”—while a founding partner of OMA New York (the firm he rebranded as REX in 2006). Testimony to the firm’s design excellence and innovation, REX and Joshua’s projects have been recognized with top accolades from peer groups, including two American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Honor Awards, a U.S. Institute for Theatre Technology National Honor Award, an American Library Association National Building Award, Time magazine’s Building of the Year, the International Design Awards Building of the Year, two American Council of Engineering Companies’ National Gold Awards, a Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat Award of Excellence, three Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize Outstanding Project Awards, listing in Architectural Digest’s AD100, and numerous state AIA, Society of American Registered Architects, ArchDaily, Architect/Progressive Architecture, Architect’s Newspaper, Architectural Review/MIPIM, Architizer, and Wallpaper* design awards. Fast Company named the firm one of the World’s 10 Most Innovative Companies in Architecture three times and ranked it No. 25 on its 2024 World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies list.
