An architecture and interior design studio in Islamabad that designs each project from a blank page for the person who will live in it, the site it stands on, and the climate it has to answer to.
A practice built around the client and the site, not around a signature.
Primarc Studio was founded in 2017 by three National College of Arts graduates – Ar. Muhammad Ali Raza, Ar. Muhammad Zubair ul Hassan, and Osama bin Shahab. Ali and Zubair had completed the five-year architecture programme at NCA Rawalpindi in 2015; Osama had graduated in fine arts, with a specialisation in miniature painting, in 2014. They had each spent the years after graduation watching Islamabad’s architecture scene closely, and noticed a pattern they wanted to work against: most studios were extensions of a single principal’s taste. A firm known for brick built in brick. A firm known for brutalism stayed brutalist. The work was often beautiful, but the client and the site rarely shaped the outcome, the studio’s signature did.
Primarc Studio was founded on the opposite premise. Every project begins with a long questionnaire about how the client actually lives, a careful study of the site and its climate, and a budget held honestly from day one. The design emerges from those three constraints rather than from a house style. It is the harder way to practice, there is no shortcut, no template to fall back on but it is what allows the studio to take on a 5-marla or 1 Kanal home in Islamabad or any city, a museum for the Pakistan Army, an urban monument, and a renovation in a hill station without forcing any of them into the same language.
Today the studio is a team of sixteen, three founding partners, architects and interior designer, draftsmen, site supervisors, and a material procurement officer working from a purpose-built office in Gulberg Greens, Islamabad. More than two hundred projects have been completed across Pakistan and, increasingly, abroad. Current and recent work spans Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and Canada.
Wide shot showing the three working zones – draftsman’s bay, architects collaborative area, and partners meeting space. Or a detail: drawings on a table, materials samples.
A medium-sized practice with one rule: never take on more than we can deliver well.
The studio occupies the second floor of The Palazzo, a mixed-use building on the Gulberg Expressway that Primarc designed itself in 2021. The interior was conceived around how design work actually happens: three zones flow into one another, a semi-private bay for the draftsmen, a collaborative space for the architects, and a larger room where the partners’ workspace, the meeting room, and the final review
table sit together.
Internally, Primarc handles architecture, interior design, and 3D visualisation in-house. Structural, MEP, and firefighting design are outsourced to long-trusted engineering partners, but their coordination with our architectural drawings happens at our table. This is, in our experience, where most Pakistani projects come undone, and it is the part we refuse to delegate. Every project includes site supervision: two full-time supervisors handle daily attendance, the project architects and partners visit personally on a regular cadence, and every project runs a WhatsApp group with daily site updates so any team member can flag an issue before it becomes a setback.
Around one or two design-and-build projects are taken on each year — a deliberately small number. We do not offer build-only services for designs done by other firms. The only buildings we construct are ones we have designed.
A flat structure, and a culture of trust over surveillance.
Primarc Studio is led by its three founding partners – Ar. Muhammad Ali Raza, Ar. Muhammad Zubair ul Hassan, and Osama bin Shahab, supported by a senior team of architects and interior designers, draftsmen, site supervisors, and a material procurement officer. Every practising architect on the team is registered with the Pakistan Council of Architects and Town Planners. Six of the studio’s architects are National College of Arts graduates; one holds an architecture degree from COMSATS University. The draftsmen carry DAE qualifications and the relevant technical diplomas, and several team members bring substantial site-floor experience alongside their studio training.
Two of the partners have taught professionally – Osama bin Shahab at the National College of Arts, and Ar. Muhammad Ali Raza at the University of Gujrat and that ongoing academic involvement quietly shapes how the studio thinks about every project: as a problem to be solved with rigour, not just a brief to be delivered.
The studio runs on a flat structure. Draftsmen speak directly to the principals. Architects own their projects end to end. Deadlines are individual and the work is reviewed on results, not on hours spent at a desk. Trust is the operating system; surveillance is not. The culture that has grown around that — slowly, deliberately, over almost a decade — is, more than any single design move, what holds the practice together.
Team Photograph – Candid of the team at work – partners around the meeting table, or a wider group shot in the studio. Avoid stiff headshot grids here, those come on the team page.
Five beliefs that shape every project
Primarc holds five beliefs strongly enough that every project is measured against them. They are written in full on the Philosophy page; in brief:
Architecture is personal.
Climate is local.
Function before elevation.
The contractor is a partner, not an executor
Craft is the difference between a stone and a diamond.
Awarded, registered, and trusted
Come to the studio
If you are considering working with us, the best way to begin is a visit. We are on the second floor of The Palazzo on Gulberg Expressway, ten minutes from Islamabad’s main arteries. We welcome visits to see how we work, to look through material samples, and to talk through a project before you commit to one.
For overseas clients, we hold scheduled video calls each week; many of our current projects from America and international clients, and in North America and the Gulf began this way.