Why AGi Architects is in the Design 100

AGi Architects was founded in Kuwait in 2006 by Joaquín Pérez-Goicoechea and Nasser Abulhasan, two Harvard-trained architects who added a Madrid base and have run the practice across both cities since. The dual address shows in the work: houses such as Three Gardens House and the Wafra Wind Tower apartments draw on Gulf vernacular strategies, courtyards, shaded balconies, minimal openings, to manage summer temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, reworked in a contemporary architectural language rather than simply quoted.

Healthcare has become an equally significant strand of the practice, with the Ali Mohammed T. Al-Ghanim Clinic, the Hisham A. Alsager Cardiac Hospital and Kuwait Children’s Hospital among its built projects. The Al-Ghanim Clinic was Highly Commended at the World Architecture Festival, one of several WAF awards the studio has collected alongside a nomination for the EU’s Mies van der Rohe Award, recognition for a practice defined more by the discipline of its climate response than by spectacle.