Worrell Yeung

Worrell Yeung is a Brooklyn-based architecture and design studio founded in 2015 by Max Worrell and Jejon Yeung. We draw inspiration from the familiar to realize experientially rich, unique buildings and spaces. Our elemental approach is deployed to blend conceptual clarity with qualitative complexity. We design across project types, including residential, commercial, civic, cultural, and adaptive reuse. We are currently working on a range of projects—art spaces, private residences, agricultural education centers and hospitality retreats—each an opportunity to create work that is essential and highly tailored to meet our client’s functional requirements while also considering a project’s longevity and adaptability to future needs and purposes. We pair this with a holistic approach to sustainability in which environmental concerns are integrated within a design alongside social and cultural considerations. This comprehensive perspective ensures a project’s success in the short and long term. We begin each project with an intimate understanding of the existing conditions. Through our process, we discover the inherent values of a place and the activities contained therein. This inquiry is driven by a desire to identify the fundamentals and historical values of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. When working within an existing space, our new interventions are calibrated to support new program functions that both contrast and complement the pre-existing, adding a new layer of history without erasing the old. For new buildings, the structure is similarly thought of as a new insertion within the context of the landscape, sensitive to the impact it has on its surroundings, as well as how the context directly shapes its form and presence. This negotiation between existing and new, historical and future, mutable and permanent, produces design responses that are always part of a larger whole—whether that be a city or landscape—and never as a standalone object.