10 Questions With… Peter Zuspan of Bureau V Architecture

National Sawdust by Bureau V Architecture (BVA), chamber music hall interior, Brooklyn, New York. Photography by Floto+Warner.

Peter Zuspan is the founding principal of Bureau V Architecture (BVA), an interdisciplinary firm he founded in 2007 with architect Stella Lee. BVA leverages experience in architecture, design, and technology to craft spaces that are both inclusive and sensitive to their surrounding communities. They recently completed the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, New York, and the Goat Farm Arts Center in Atlanta. The firm is currently working on the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, a Manhattan institution dedicated to LGBTQIA+ art worldwide, and HERE Arts Center, a performance arts center in New York.

Drawing from other disciplines and creative practices, Zuspan is committed to building stronger communities through his projects. He believes that “architecture is at its most vital when it is crossed with the complexities of human life and different forms of cultural expression.” Zuspan earned a Master of Architecture from Columbia University, and he is licensed to practice architecture in New York and Georgia. Based in Brooklyn, New York, BVA is a certified LGBT Business Enterprise (LGBTBE).

Interior Design speaks with Peter Zuspan about BVA’s early projects (including for Brooklyn’s National Sawdust), how he focused on the local community for the Goat Farm Arts Center in Atlanta, and what work he hopes to tackle in the coming years.

Peter Zuspan in the Black Box Theater of the Bushwick Starr. Photography by Kelly Marshall.

Peter Zuspan Crafts Architectural Projects With Cultural Expression

National Sawdust by Bureau V Architecture (BVA), chamber music hall interior, Brooklyn, New York. Photography by Floto+Warner.

Interior Design: What drew you to architecture and to founding Bureau V Architecture with architect Stella Lee?

Peter Zuspan: It’s a fun cocktail of confusion, ignorance, and friendship. I came to architecture through a process of elimination. At one point, I decided to take a studio course with architect/filmmaker Madeline Schwartzman. I was so confused by it all. I wasn’t a great student, but I was intrigued. I’m drawn to things I don’t quite understand at first. (Madeline has remained a friend and supporter of my work—I can’t overstate the importance of good teachers.)

Over the years, I worked with several architects and business partners. Stella has been my longest design collaborator. We met in grad school, both worked for other architects for a few years, and were itching to quit. We were in our 20s, unlicensed, and figured if we were going to try doing our own thing, it was as good a time as any. Ignorance of what it takes to start a studio played a huge role in launching Bureau V Architecture. But we also wanted to turn our friendship into a creative voice and to create a practice where life outside the studio was as philosophically integral as time spent in it.

ID: What were the firm’s earliest projects and what do you reflect on when you look back at them?

PZ: BVA’s first projects were on the fringes of architecture. I have a background in performance, so that experience substantially informed the studio’s early work. We did a performance at the Guggenheim with the collective assume vivid astro focus, fashion installations with Mary Ping of Slow and Steady Wins the Race at PS1 and Lafayette Anticipations, and a performance installation with Arto Lindsay at the Venice Biennale. We had collaborative projects in major cultural institutions early on—but always through a back door, invited by the artists, not the institutions.

A year into our studio, we received the commission for National Sawdust, an acoustically driven chamber music hall in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It became our first completed building and, arguably, the project we’re still most known for. While it took eight years for it to be completed, it really was one of our earliest design projects.

These early works absolutely inform the way we think today. Our design processes are grounded in working with people we respect and in listening to them. We also love to take on projects with new problems that we haven’t encountered before. We had never designed an installation before. We had never performed in a museum. We had never designed a chamber music hall. But we did all of these things, and somehow convinced some incredible people to trust us. We rely on that trust and that sense of possibility in all of work.

Bushwick Starr by Bureau V Architecture (BVA), exterior, Brooklyn, New York. Photography by Kelly Marshall.

ID: How did you want to engage with history, as well as the contemporary, with the new Bushwick Starr, previously a warehouse?

PZ: The Bushwick Starr was a new exploration for us, helping us find a new method for resolving what important design could be and how it manifests. National Sawdust is very visually assertive; the Starr was not going to follow that path. We needed to create a space that supported inventive performances while somehow keeping the space unkempt, a bit feral, familiar, but also highly tuned. It was quite a puzzle.

We started with the familiar. The post-industrial art space is, at this point, a well-established and approachable international style. From London’s Tate Modern to Beijing’s 798 Art Zone to Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, there is a scenographic quality to these urban masonry buildings that can help to remove intimidation from a patron’s approach to a cultural institution.

We wanted to rely on this model of familiarity, but also take it a step further and in some ways mask the space. Many of the single-story buildings that occupy the Starr’s immediate neighborhood house car repair shops. So we decided to base the building’s lobby, something the Starr had never had before, in this hyper-local vernacular. This reference made the space familiar, absolutely not precious, but also not a theater lobby. And the idea is that this conceptual cocktail creates a new lobby typology—one that can grow into having its own program and culture within the Starr community and can help to establish a new spatial identity for the future of the institution.

ID: How were you thinking about building community when working on the Goat Farm Arts Center?

PZ: We were brought into Goat Farm Arts Center to spearhead the design of its 12-acre campus. The Goat Farm has been a naturally occurring artist and artisan community in Atlanta since the 1970s. So, in many ways, we were less tasked with building community and more helping the team understand how design can help enshrine an existing community and its identity in perpetuity.

The arts context in Atlanta is very different than it is, say, in New York City. As a state, Georgia ranks the lowest in available governmental and institutional arts funding. The Goat Farm has long survived this lack of support by combining real estate prowess with supporting artists and their community. It’s an inventive model: channeling gentrification into supporting rather than displacing artists. (It’s actually a similar strategy to the one we used in the design of National Sawdust). So, in their efforts to develop the property to add more density of occupation and thus more funds to support the arts ecosystem, they asked for our help to understand what role design could play in this form of supportive development.

I grew up in Atlanta. While I understand much of the city’s larger context, I haven’t lived there for many years. We spent a great deal of time speaking with artists in the community, researching and understanding work that has come out of the campus over the years, as well as understanding what the campus’s past has been. One of the primary goals that we landed on was for the Goat Farm to maintain an identity as an artists’s backyard. Its exterior spaces should create a kind of interior. It should be at an approachable scale, hold ample, uncurated outdoor space to take a walk around in. It should be a place where you could sit down outside your studio on any given afternoon or evening and immediately feel like you’re home.

Goat Farm Arts Center by Bureau V Architecture (BVA). Photography by Dustin Chambers.

ID: You’ve done numerous projects in New York City and also worked outside of it. In what ways does place inform your projects?

PZ: Location is really important in our work. As architects, we are often tasked with constructing the physical and psychological value of a place. It’s an incredible opportunity and responsibility.

While we are based in New York City, we are working more and more outside of it. I am a firm believer in the power of ignorance to find new solutions, devise new ideas, and create powerful new expressive works. So the opportunity to work in new contexts is an important part of the studio’s creative practice. We have to work hard outside of our home turf to listen and understand the voices that occupy the space of our projects, but listening can be a profoundly creative space.

ID: I understand you are a trained opera singer. Can you tell us about your manifesto on opera as well as your multi-disciplinary residency at the San Francisco Opera?

PZ: In addition to the countless lives lost to the pandemic, its wake has also fundamentally shifted how we think about public gatherings and events. In many ways, we are just starting to understand some of these ramifications. In 2022, the San Francisco Opera developed a residency program where they invited six artists from different disciplines to learn about the process of making opera and to think with them, in the strangeness of this time and context, on what opera’s future could be. The idea was essentially to leverage both our disciplinary expertises with our collective ignorance of opera production to help think about new trajectories for the medium.

Encounter Machines grew out of this residency. The project is a manifesto of writings and drawings that I have been developing over the past few years. The project works through issues of bigness, failure, queerness, ignorance, and the peculiarities of opera to position new concepts for the medium that rely heavily on space and design as tools for finding new relevances for opera. It also posits how design should conceptually listen to opera—a sometimes antiquated, but powerful medium that understands scale and empathy so well, and has managed to turn a scream into something beautiful and desirable.

Bushwick Starr by Bureau V Architecture (BVA), black box theater, Brooklyn, New York. Photography by Kelly Marshall.

ID: And your firm is quite multi-disciplinary itself, tackling architecture, industrial design, installations, event design, and more. How does that approach provide creative opportunities?

PZ: While BVA is closest to an architectural practice in our methods and philosophy, we do work in mediums beyond its boundaries. And the studio’s origins are in work outside of architecture—in performance and installations.

I love architecture, but I first studied it in a liberal arts context alongside literature, political philosophy, ethics, and art history. Many of my friends work in the arts, so when I’m not in the studio, I’m watching films, going to performances, seeing exhibitions, and talking about them. It’s this context that frames how I think about design. I believe architecture is at its most vital when it is crossed with the complexities of human life and different forms of cultural expression. As I like architecture that is muddied by life’s complexities, I think it’s important that the studio’s work takes leaps outside of itself as well. We’ve been lucky enough to have been granted some of those opportunities—to use our ignorance to new disciplines as a weapon to combat the more staid currents within our own industry, and to leverage its strengths within others.

ID: In what ways does emerging technology fuel your work and your projects?

PZ: My mother worked for IBM for 32 years, and my father was a computer programmer. In the early days of the studio, before our income was more stable, I used to take on coding jobs to make ends meet. Technology has played an outsized role in my life for as long as I can remember. And, in many ways, technology is not so much something I’ve been fascinated with (which I have been), but is more so a means by which I process ideas.

When we were designing National Sawdust’s interior chamber hall, we were faced with a complex problem of how to create a compelling, visual space that was going to be absolutely overwrought with cables, outlets, registers, grilles, interfaces, courtesy outlets, and various apparatuses. Writing code as a creative process was as much a part of our design process as was our hand-drawing of its interior ornamental patterning. It was a means by which we could understand and orchestrate complexity.

National Sawdust by Bureau V Architecture (BVA), lobby, Brooklyn, New York. Photography by Floto+Warner.

Bushwick Starr by Bureau V Architecture, lobby, Brooklyn, New York. Photography by Kelly Marshall.

ID: Are there any lessons or architectural gestures from past projects that are informing current projects, including the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art and HERE Art Center?

PZ: Both of these projects have developed communities over decades. While I consider myself part of these communities in ways, I am, of course, no expert. So in that sense, taking the time to understand the human context of our past projects has absolutely impacted how we are approaching the design of these projects.

Drawing in the margins of the voices of others is one of my favorite means of thinking and designing. I’ll say it again, listening can be such fertile creative ground. While BVA has become known for some spatial ideas, I think the piece that links our work more closely is this process of working in the margins of others. We don’t believe in the heroic architect model. We believe the best and most inventive ideas often come from the margins, where way more communication and experimentation are possible.

ID: Is there a different type of project you’re hoping to work on in the coming years or perhaps a sector or discipline you feel drawn to explore?

PZ: There are definitely a few things I’ve been dreaming of. I’d love to design the space or set for an opera. I’d also love to work on architecture that is not quite meant for people. To design a power plant or an art storage facility—these programs that are here for us, but with a degree of separation from us—would be fascinating. And I’d also love to do a fantastic residential project. We have just started working on designing a home. As I reflect on our studio’s past and where I hope it will go, collaborating with incredible people has always given me the most pleasure in design.

Goat Farm Arts Center, by Bureau V Architecture (BVA), featuring Blue Gate by InKyoung Choi Chun. Photography by Dustin Chambers.