Peter CulleyArchitect

Peter Culley is the creative leader and founder of Spatial Affairs Bureau – an architecture, landscape, and general design studio based in Los Angeles, Richmond VA and London.

Central to Peter’s ethos for Spatial Affairs Bureau’s practice is being open across disciplines and scales, recognising and embracing the limits of a scenario, and bringing experts in their fields to enable rich collaborations and experimentation. He comes from a background in cultural projects where buildings and landscape are considered hand in hand in search of a delicate balance, and tries to view the building envelope more as a uniting filter between interior and exterior environments, than as a hard cut-off between them. He believes that design response is a carefully orchestrated reconciliatory process that operates between a series of intermeshing factors that include site needs and opportunity; client and project premise; creative intuition; and technological pertinence.

Peter’s basis in cultural work stems from a decade with Rick Mather Architects, where as project director he oversaw the $200m Virginia Museum of Fine Arts museum and campus landscape expansion, and London’s South Bank Centre 30-acre masterplan along the Thames across from the Houses of Parliament. His inherent sense of landscape alongside architecture was fostered earlier, working with US landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson as project architect for the National Botanic Garden of Wales Great Glasshouse Interior Landscape, and the National Heritage Lottery Crystal Palace Park remodel and renovation project, together with John Lyall Architects.

Peter Culley has been thesis instructor for the University of Southern California’s Master of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism graduate program; Professor of Practice at Woodbury School of Architecture, Burbank, CA; and diploma tutor in the masters program at the Bartlett, University College London. He is an Associate AIA member, serves on the UK’s RIBA Visiting Board for Architecture School Accreditation, and is trained as a Passive House consultant.