Arion Kocani Design Workshop
AKDW was founded as a workshop: a place for thinking, making, and refining—where work develops slowly and is guided by restraint, material presence, and attention to context, not as aesthetic choices but as ethical ones. The practice seeks a balance between precision and atmosphere - design that speaks with clarity and resonates with feeling.
The practice is kept small, working across architecture, objects, and art. It was founded in 2020, when Albanian-American architect and designer Arion Kocani set up the first studio in Dhërmi, a small coastal village in southern Albania, where the setting encourages a more attentive way of working.
Kocani holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard University and separate degrees in Architecture and Economics from the University of Maryland. Before founding AKDW, his professional path moved between architecture and development, with earlier work at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) on international high-rise and adaptive reuse projects, and later at Hudson’s Bay Company—the oldest continuously operating company in North America—focusing on the transformation of large-scale retail properties.
During his graduate studies at Harvard, he apprenticed with Sou Fujimoto in Tokyo and with KieranTimberlake in Philadelphia, and collaborated on academic research with Pritzker Prize–winning architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and Martino Tattara, on regional planning in Switzerland, as well as with Harvard’s Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure. His work has been exhibited at Gallery A4 in Tokyo and published in Achtung: die Landschaft and several editions of GSD Platform.
All of this supports a way of working that remains modest in scale and quiet in tone. Projects are allowed to unfold slowly, so that structure and material can find their place and everyday use can stay in view. The work looks for a clear, calm presence rather than spectacle—rooms that admit light easily, surfaces that can age without hurry, sequences of space that are simple to move through yet linger in memory. Across buildings and objects, the hope is that what is made in the practice will feel precise and careful, and, over time, quietly companionable.