Analogous Spaces was founded in Ghent in 2016, on the premise that the people who design where information physically lives — librarians, archivists, curators — had already solved most of the problems digital design keeps rediscovering.
We're a small studio: spatial designers, one architectural historian, and a couple of people who spend more time reading about card catalogues than is strictly professional. We take on a limited number of built projects each year — offices, libraries, galleries, homes — and publish a weekly essay on the journal exploring the ideas underneath them.
The name is a small joke with a serious point. An analogy isn't a decoration on top of an argument; done properly, it's a way of testing whether an idea actually holds up outside the one context you first found it in. If a principle explains both how a good library works and how a good website works, it's probably a real principle. If it only explains one, it was probably just a convention.
Led by practitioners with backgrounds in architecture and exhibition design, responsible for every built project.
An architectural historian and two writers who maintain the journal and advise on the theoretical grounding of studio projects.
Specialists who move between physical signage systems and digital information architecture, often on the same project.