Christopher L. Mercier is an established artist/designer in pursuit of understanding the nature of spatial experience and its relationship to mental and spiritual, potential and physical well being. Through the over lapping and intermingling of painting, sculpture and architecture he attempts to uncover an alternative approach to the making of exciting yet practicable environments.
Born and raised outside Detroit, Michigan, Mercier completed his Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in architecture at Lawrence University. After graduating, he spent a year in Milan, Italy, working under Daniel Libeskind at the ‘Architecture Intermundium.’ Sortly after he completed a graduate degree in architecture at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). During graduate school, he became interested in the materiality of building and worked as a metal fabricator and then shop foreman for Metalmorphosis. Being exposed to the various mediums of the built environment, Mercier continued to explore issues of space through painting, sculpture and drawing.
Mercier went on to work for various Los Angeles based architects including spending nine years at Gehry Partners, L.L.C. (formally Frank O. Gehry & Associates) as a Senior Associate/Project Architect. There he experienced the possibilities of architecture and art becoming a fluid buildable idea. Working on and overseeing a diverse list of projects, clientele and collaborative efforts, ranging from the Condé Nast Cafeteria in New York to the Bilbao Museum in Spain, master planning project for Playa Vista, conceptual design for a walking bridge in London with artist Richard Serra, the Bio-Diversity Museum in Panama and many more, Mercier developed a broad range of professional abilities and unique design sensibilities.
Mercier developed a unique style based on exploiting the potentials within architecture and art to create a fluid environmental concept within the confines of practical construction. His interest in the interrelationship of the mediums of painting, sculpture and architecture continually feeds his design process. In 1998 Mercier established FER, whose mission is to provide exciting solutions in the arena of contemporary designed environments.
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Douglas Pierson grew up first inside and then outside the nation’s beltway loop that surrounds Washington DC. Educated at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, he stepped outside of his circle and enrolled in the Lettres program at the Université Paul Valéry in Montpelier, France, before completing his B.A. in History in 1987.
While pursuing a Masters in Architecture at Virginia Tech, Douglas once more crossed borders, this time spending four years traveling and working in Europe and Australia. There he collected invaluable design experience such as a super light pre-fabricated 13th floor hospital wing perched atop an existing brutalist concrete structure. He also managed the design, construction and curatorial work for several art exhibits housed in an early Norman Foster structure, including the works and collections of Pablo Picasso and Howard Hodgkins.
Upon returning to the United States in 1995, he settled in Los Angeles first as a project architect for Hodgetts and Fung, then as an architect in Frank Gehry’s office developing several projects ranging from a museum housing Jimi Hendrix’s guitars, to the revamping of Washington DC’s oldest private art institution a block away from the White House. He is now a partner in this new and exciting studio aptly named: (form, environment, research)
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