Shamika Thomas's Colleagues at OJT
Shamika Thomas's Contact Details
Trinidad and Tobago
OJT
Shamika Thomas's Company Details
OJT is a New Orleans-based architecture and urban design practice focused on thoughtful design.We work on a varied range of project types at all times. Programmatically, this includes some cultural work, quite a bit of housing (single- and multi-family), hospitality, office space, education, transit and architectural planning. The scale of this work goes from the quite small — both in budget and scope — to the fairly large (10 million sf and up and regional-level focus). Regardless of the particular parameters, we bring the same intensity of imagination and invention to everything we do. Each project is special to us. And we give them each special attention. As a complement to our commissioned projects, we incorporate a fair amount of research and speculative investigation into the workflow of the practice. This tends to take the form of broad studies of conditions that either propel a concept or observation that is central to a particular work or, in some cases, initiate new projects altogether. It is, for us, a form of elaborating what we do in a way that is very much about architectural and urban design but is not confined to the limits of a particular project brief. We believe this expands our intellectual capacity and improves the work as a whole. We benefit and so do those that work with us. While we welcome every opportunity, we enjoy making them as well. Most recently this involves the creation of a housing program that addresses, what we felt, was a deficiency in the city: design + affordability. Our team appreciates and champions the possibilities of architecture, but values the complex dynamics (urban environments, development objectives, regulatory overlays, etc.) that complicate the formation of buildings. We make thoughtful work by engaging in these dynamics.