Anna Kostreva, Alex Head, Image: Fabrizio Dal Vera, 2023

Who We Are and What We Do

Plural studio is an architectural design studio with a focus on books and reading spaces. Co-founders Anna Kostreva and Alex Head have lived in Berlin, Glasgow, London, Florence, New York, and Johannesburg. They are both dedicated to critical and cultural production, experienced in practising across interdisciplinary fields with wide ranging collaborations. They have combined their forces to advocate for intellectual and artistic rigour, bringing their clients professional results that intertwine life and culture.

Plural is passionate about normalizing natural materials and sustainable methods into the urban built environment; for example, celebrating the maintenance of older buildings, incorporating permaculture concepts into design thinking, and looking for ways to avoid waste and resource extraction in a building’s life-cycle.

We offer a range of architectural design and project management services for new and existing buildings:

- Scope assessment and project brainstorming
- Design of custom plans, layouts and furnishings.
- Custom structural and cosmetic alterations to existing buildings.
- Design, curation, and coordination of custom large scale artworks
- Daily project management of on-going works / renovation works
- Sourcing, curation, and installation of materials, finishes, furniture, artworks, lighting, mirrors, curtains and other interior accessories (including coordination of all transportation services and delivery reception)

- And more...

  • Anna Kostreva

    (1985, USA/GERMANY) is an architectural designer, artist, writer and urban researcher.

    Driven by her passion of architecture and art, she is most inspired by acts of learning and creativity. She has published three books which illustrate her visions of urban life: Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows with Plural Studio in 2023, Three Pathways to Get Anywhere in 2015 with Rough Beast, and Berlin: A Morphology of Walls in 2014. She also produces the interview series “Recast by Design” on sub_ʇxǝʇ radio, with thematic focus on solidarity, politics, and sustainability in cities. In 2021 she co-founded a neighbourhood climate action group (Klima und Kiez) in Berlin, focused on local energy use, maintaining green spaces and encouraging urban biodiversity.

    Anna is a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Architecture, NYC, and the recipient of a 2009 Fulbright Grant for research on post-apartheid urbanism in Johannesburg, South Africa. While working in offices in Berlin, Germany, from 2010-2017, she collaborated on award winning competitions with SMAQ, was a project architect for the design and construction of the Mehr! Theater Hamburg with F101, and planned all of the permanent furniture for the National Museum for Art and Design in Oslo with Kleihues-Schuwerk. She has taught architecture and urban research courses at the University of Bath in England, the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany, the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

  • Alex Head

    (1983, UK/Germany) is an interdisciplinary artist interested in creating non-hierarchical networks of artists, researchers and citizens.

    From radio stations to project coordination his work engages with people, ideas and cooperative solutions. He has worked across the fields of youth and migrant theater, commissioned public artwork, radio production and curation and numerous panel discussions concerning racial politics, land rights and knowledge production.

    His new book Ricochet has drawn approval from artistic, scientific and anthropological quarters. Ricochet - Cultural Epigenetics and the Philosophy of Change is distributed globally and enjoys continued sales parallel to his first book Here Comes Trouble (2016).

    Here Comes Trouble, An Inquiry into Art, Magic and Madness as Deviant Knowledge, the authors MA thesis, is in its third print and has sold over 1300 copies worldwide.

    Head is Co-Founder of Wasteland Twinning Network, a transdisciplinary network for parallel research into urban wastelands.

    He studied a Bachelors of Arts in Sculpture & Environmental Art at The Glasgow School of Art (2007), including an exchange programme at Pratt University, New York (2005). He attained a Masters at Raumstrategien (Spatial Strategies), focusing on Fine Art and Political Theory, at Weißensee School of Art, Berlin (2016).

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