Spatial, Digital, Tactile

I organize my work into three pillars  — Spatial, Digital, and Tactile.

They aren’t three separate businesses… they’re three lenses on the same practice, and depending on where you’re standing, you’ll see them differently.

The lens of a single project

The most common path.

Follow one project from the first phone call to the final walkthrough, and you’ll watch it move through all three pillars in sequence.

It starts digital. Before anything is built — sometimes before a site is even secured — a project lives in conceptual space.  Extensive 3D BIM models.  Renderings built to generate funding, to get a client’s team aligned, to prove a concept is worth the investment. This is architecture before it has a body.  It’s still architecture — it’s just not physical yet.

Then it becomes spatial. The digital vision resolves into a real site, a real structure, real square footage.  This is the phase most people think of when they hear “architect” — plans, permits, framing, the building taking shape.

And finally, it becomes tactile. This is the layer you actually live in.  The materials you see. The surfaces you touch. The floor under your feet and the cabinetry under your hand.  A building can be spatially resolved and still feel unfinished until the tactile layer is right — because tactile is where a space stops being a floor plan and starts being somewhere you feel something.

Digital, then spatial, then tactile. One project, one throughline, three phases.

The lens of the practice

But step back from any single project, and the pillars stop being sequential — they become parallel. Three kinds of work I take on independently of each other.

Spatial is architecture and interiors in the traditional sense — the design of built space.

Digital is branding, web design, identity systems, digital storefronts — and also the conceptual work I described above, done for its own sake. A project doesn’t have to become a building to be real work. Sometimes a client needs a vision, a pitch deck, a way to see what a space could be, and that’s the whole engagement.

Tactile is materiality and objects — not just the finishes inside a space I’ve designed, but standalone pieces. Custom cabinetry. A metal guardrail. A shadowbox built from reclaimed wood. Tactile work doesn’t require a building around it at all.

Looked at this way, the three pillars are three services, three ways someone might hire Larc, three different kinds of problems I get to solve.

Why it matters

Both of these are true at once, and I think that’s the point.

Architecture, at its core, holds all three — the conceptual, the spatial, the material — whether it’s happening inside one project’s timeline or across three completely different engagements.

When I say “digital,” I don’t just mean a website. When I say “tactile,” I don’t just mean a finish schedule.

Each pillar is doing real design work, whether or not there’s ever a building attached to it.