“If you want to live in it, then you have to live with it.” 

-— Willam M. Soniat Jr.

In the contemporary global era where complex systems predominate and “nature turns out to be more like human nature -- unpredictable, sensitive to the surrounding world, influenced by small fluctuations” we agree with John Urry that “this suggests enormous interdependencies, parallels, overlaps and convergences between analyses of physical and social worlds.”1 Our research practice speculates on the role of design in the confluence of multiple, seemingly contrary systems and aspires to develop tectonics that configure their futures. Our sites are never grounded, our conditions are never predictable, and our parameters are always in flux; they exist at the edges and transformational zones where infrastructure, geology, cultural habitation, and ecology cohabit at best as a composition of disparate parts, an assemblage. Our research practice essentially searches to define the assemblage in order to reveal the elusive potentialities found within complex systems. Located south of I-10 between an alligator and the petrochemical industry, deep in the terra viscus of Southern Louisiana, emerymcclure architecture practices to contribute to the rich and unique global traditions where sociocultural and physical contexts are entrenched in the way architecture is established and constructed.

1. John Urry, “Complexity,” Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23 (2006): 111-117 at 11.