OFF THE RADAR
Natalie Savva
Studio naama is a multidisciplinary design practice founded by Natalie Savva and Mark Rist with a shared desire to participate, embolden and build. Our work is playful and experimental, grounded in rigorous research, colliding domestic and public typologies and considering our architecture as part of its wider community. Fabrication, the craft of building, and creating tactility, movement and atmospheres are at our core; sustainability is a given; we frame vernacular and heritage through a lens of constant change, never static, always evolving. We retrofit and build new architectures, furnitures and public objects, producing creative, beautiful and socially engaging environments across all project typologies.
The studio was awarded the Architecture Foundation’s Young Architects Residency in 2022 and is featured in the publication New Architects 4. The practice has exhibited at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale and has designed exhibitions in Cyprus and the UK, receiving a shortlist in the Museums and Heritage Awards 2026. The studio’s projects have been finalists in the AJ Retrofit & Reuse Awards and Small Projects Awards and won a Don’t Move Improve Award in 2023. ‘Making Housing Public’, the studio’s teaching unit since 2021, focuses on engaging and empowering communities and promoting sustainable and equitable architecture.
Off The Radar explores whether purposeful unrefinement, incompletion and the ambiguous nature of pluralist complexities can be used as design methodologies in the development of new and existing neighbourhoods, architectures and everyday objects; with the aim of staving off the prevalent flattening and prescriptive forces associated with the commodification of our lived environments long enough to allow for new and hybrid creative identity realms to be drawn from the uniqueness of locality and an everydayness of human interactivity and ingenuity.
We are struck by the conviviality and social cohesion that plays out in ambiguous spaces that often challenge our preconceptions of type and publicness or allow creativity through one’s ability to appropriate or participate. Our practice has become overtly civic and engrained with an avoidance of ‘productisation’ in favour of a catalyst - a producer of events, happenings, learnings and interconnectedness.
In our work across domestic and public projects, exhibition designs and teaching we embrace the following assertions: Methods to empower and instil a sense of ownership and commonality / A stance of generosity allowing space for people, homes, communities and neighbourhoods to grow / Structuralism, utility and restraint as a prerequisite for aesthetics to be modified and layered / The promotion of less rather than more, for economic and environmental sustainability. We frame the design of our architectures, structures, furnitures and objects through this lens as tools for publicness, challenging common trends of capitalist developments and moving towards architecture as a shared act, craft and participation.
Our role is not always to transform the totality of spaces; sometimes it is focused on small interventions, carefully designed objects or planning for a sustainable future. What is constant is our commitment to finding radical ways to create a legacy of evolution that provides for people and their communities.