Javier Zubiria was born in San Sebastián in 1986 and now works from Amsterdam, where he founded zU-studio. The practice builds on a language that is unmistakably sculptural: the structure itself carries the character of each project, and functionality and wellbeing develop together rather than in separate stages. Zubiria trained at ETSAUN (University of Navarra) and spent two years working alongside his former professor, Luis María Uriarte, before setting up zU-studio in 2015. He chose Amsterdam, a city he barely knew at the time, for the room it gave him to think without constraints.

Zubiria approaches architecture as an extension of human connection: understanding people, he says, is what allows a project to carry real meaning. That understanding shapes how the studio works — hand sketches, site visits, open conversation with the client — and it also shapes which commissions the studio takes on, choosing projects where that connection is already in place.

The same attention to context and to the natural setting runs through his renovation of a farmhouse in the Basque Country, where the original building’s character is preserved even as its use is rethought for the present.

Among the studio’s key projects is the Drift Museum, developed within the wider transformation of Van Gendt Hallen in Amsterdam. There, Zubiria and his team have turned a 25,000-square-metre industrial building into a cultural space that engages directly with the work of the Dutch duo Drift, pairing a cross-laminated timber (CLT) structure with careful attention to the building’s historic fabric.

In Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, the N2 house takes its cue from the birds that pass over the coastline: its sculptural roof, drawn from the form of a bird’s plumage, sets up a continuous route between indoors and outdoors within the surrounding tropical landscape.

Two retail projects for Polette show how differently the studio can respond to a single brief. The Paris showroom (2022) takes the form of an inverted pyramid, built around the idea of “the world upside down,” while Imagine Polette in Antwerp (2022) turns the store itself into an instrument, referencing John Lennon’s Imagine through two full-scale piano keyboards that visitors can play.