Overview

The NOW Institute is the urban research wing at Morphosis Architects located in Culver City, CA. We are dedicated to understanding and improving urban environments through sustainable solutions across the globe. From Port-au-Prince, Cap Haitiën, New Orleans, Madrid, Beijing to Los Angeles, we work with urban communities and institutions to produce interdisciplinary strategies. We engage in emerging economies to post industrial cities, analyzing each location from a cultural, socio-economic, and community-based lens. With the values of equity, higher quality of life, and sustainability at our forefront, we are committed to partnering with entities that have limited resources for strategy development and envisioning. We have worked with local and national governments, social and cultural institutions, assisted in community outreach, and tested both trends and hypotheses to find the right way to go ahead. Rather than a single solution, we focus on elastic strategies—or tactics, that can adapt to the appropriate user group, territory, timing and unforeseeable future circumstances.

Historically, the NOW institute has collaborated with graduate, research and city design programs at academic institutions in the United States and abroad. Initiated in 2001, we produced the eponymous cultural and geospatial almanac L.A. NOW in collaboration with the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and ArtCenter College of Design. The NOW has partnered with many universities, most prominently with UCLA's School of the Arts and Architecture. Other academic partners include UPenn's Weitzman School of Design, MIT, Rice, Syracuse University, Pratt Institute, and Harvard GSD.

Now, we are an independent entity and have chosen to focus on our research within Morphosis Architects, in addition to academic institutions. As a part of Morphosis Architects, we have enhanced our capacities and resources to engage in our projects.