Oscar
León.

I grew up between two countries and trained as an architect in Spain. The quiet of the houses I knew as a kid stuck with me harder than any building I studied later in school. I have spent twenty years trying to understand why some rooms calm certain people and shake others, and what an architect can do about it.

In 2019 I finished a thesis on neuroarchitecture: how spatial geometry, light, materials, and acoustics calm or agitate specific nervous systems. The thesis drew on research from the Salk Institute and the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA). It also drew on a hundred conversations with people standing inside houses they did not feel right in.

Out of that work, ARCH-S took shape: a studio that designs houses around temperament before square footage. Custom residential, a small line of cabins, and the long pieces of writing the work needs to be honest about itself.

The book, The Architecture of You, is the public version of the studio method. It compresses what takes years to learn from inside a practice into a method anyone can use to read a room.

I work between Madrid and the United States. The studio takes a small number of full custom projects each year and grows the cabin catalog by one or two new releases.

If you have read the book or taken the test, the first conversation is shorter than you would expect.