PERIPHERAL OFFICE is an architecture, placekeeping, and community action research studio. The practice situates on the periphery by choice—embracing margins, borders, and otherness as sites of belonging, resistance, and creative power—offering radical perspectives from which to affirm, imagine, and co-create our vision of the world. 

 
TONIA SING CHI 季欣恬 AIA, NOMA is a transdisciplinary designer, builder, organizer, and licensed architect based in Oakland on Ohlone land, where she is from. As the founder of Peripheral Office, she weaves together built environment storytelling, place-based building practices, and reciprocal, cross-cultural approaches to public art, architecture, and preservation. Tonia has taught courses on design justice, reparations and the built environment, community design-build, and furniture making at University of California Berkeley, University at Buffalo, Florida A&M University, and University of Utah. She holds an MArch and a master’s of science in historic preservation from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she received the Charles McKim Prize for Excellence in Design, the AIA Henry Adams Medal, the Historic Preservation Faculty Award for Outstanding Thesis, the William Kinne Fellows Traveling Prize, and the KPF Paul Katz Fellowship.

Tonia Tonia is a co-founder and director of community design at Nááts’íilid Initiative,  an Indigenous-led nonprofit strengthening the cultural and economic resilience of Dinétah through self-reliance initiatives in the built environment. She is also a design-build instructor with Girls Garage and a core organizer with Dark Matter U.   

Current and Past Partners: Basic Needs Center (Berkeley, CA), City Slicker Farms (Oakland, CA), Urban Tilth (Richmond, CA), Shelterwood Collective (Cazadero, CA), UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design (Berkeley, CA), Yestermorrow Design/Build School (Warren, VT)

Connect & Inquire: po@peripheraloffice.com
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