Hero.
Full-width photograph of the studio interior, a wide angle of the architects’ workspace, the long view through the three working zones, or the partners’ meeting area with natural light. We can cater this via three columns also.
Avoid the trophy image (that belongs on the About page hero) and avoid project renders. This page is about the practice, not the product.
How Primarc Studio works – the practice, the space, the way we deliver.
A Studio built around the work, not around the founder.
Most architecture studios in Pakistan are organized around one person. The principal sets the aesthetic, makes the decisions, signs the drawings, and the rest of the office executes. We were founded on a different idea.
In 2017, three of us, Ar. Muhammad Ali Raza, Ar. Muhammad Zubair ul Hassan, and Osama bin Shahab, left separate careers to start a practice that would put the client and the design first, in that order, with the architects’ personal preferences a long way down the list. We had each spent the early years after graduation watching the gap between what clients actually needed and what studios actually delivered. Brick firms built in brick. Brutalist firms stayed brutalist.
Clients with a 1-kanal plot in B-17 were sold the same plan as clients with a 2-kanal plot in DHA. We thought there was a better way to do this.
The conviction behind Primarc was specific. The client and the design should be put first, even though those two are often at odds, clients do not always know what is best for them, and design is itself relative. Holding both honestly, project by project, is the harder practice. It does not produce a recognizable house style. It does, we believe, produce better buildings.
After eight years and more than 200 projects, the studio’s identity has become recognizable in a different way: in the breadth, in the detail, and in the fact that every project we publish looks different from the one before it.
How we work
Primarc Studio is a medium-sized practice of sixteen people. Architecture and interior design are both handled in-house, as is 3D visualization, on-site supervision, and project management. We outsource only what genuinely belongs to a different discipline, structural engineering, MEP design, and firefighting design and we keep the coordination between those consultants and our drawings inside our office, never on the client’s plate. This coordination is, in our experience, where most Pakistani projects come undone. It is the part we refuse to delegate.
We are a design-first studio. The work that comes out of Primarc starts as design, and the projects we take on are projects we have the bandwidth to think about properly. We do not overload the studio. We do not chase volume. As a deliberate policy, we take on no more than one or two construction-management projects per year — only on designs we have produced ourselves, never on someone else’s drawings because the kind of on-site involvement we believe in cannot be applied to ten projects simultaneously.
Every project we design is supervised on site. Designing is half the job; making sure the design is built the way it was drawn is the other half. Our two site supervisors live on the projects we have ongoing. The principal architects visit regularly. Every project runs a WhatsApp group with daily updates from the site, so that any member of the team can spot a problem early and raise it with the client before it becomes expensive.
We do not take on more projects than we can properly deliver. That single discipline, more than any design move, is what defines the practice.
The Palazzo, Gulberg Greens – a building we designed ourselves
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.