Nov 1, 2008

What is Deer Park Alpha?

****STOP PRESS*: WE ARE ARCHITECTS.***

Oh no………….what now? What do we write here? This is where it gets difficult. How about, “Deer Park Apha is the most innovative and creative design firm in the universe.”, and “Deer Park Alpha listens to its customers and develops innovative solutions that….” Hang on, NO, that is the usual marketing rubbish.

It is easy for Deer Park Alpha to design and build a rethink of housing, or develop an innovative approach to tool-up homeless people or even write a beginner’s guide to urban design. But this ‘About’ stuff…..you see the problem with the usual company blurb, especially for design and architecture firms, is that it is utter tosh. Everyone knows it, yet it still goes on. Some sort of need to conform we suppose. Well screw it, we do not conform.

Deer Park Alpha started in December 2005 when architect, Carl Leroy-Smith and artist, Oliver Merkin decided to enter an international ideas competition in Dover, UK. We came up with the idea in one-minute, did some beautiful drawings and got shortlisted to five. We imagined how we would spend the prize money, and lost. The name, and our corny strap line Think, Create, Enjoy came out of the rush to submit that competition. The deer above, scavenged at 3AM from Ebay, became the logo. And yes, yes, we scabbed the name from Mozilla Firefox 1.5, it was too good to waste. We love deer park’s too.

The firm was born from a passion for ideas and having fun. Lock us in a room and we will re-imagine the whole world a million times over. We can draw too, and we can do a project programme, and yes we do budgets and deadlines. So as we do all this arty-stuff, builders and other serious people must hate us, right? Wrong. Because we compromise, we know how things go together, and we know that a project belongs to everyone involved.

Worked out what we do yet?