Who are they? Established in 2007, davidclovers is the design and architecture practice of David Erdman and Clover Lee (right with Erdman). Originally based in Los Angeles, the company moved its headquarters to Wan Chai in April last year. In 2008, Erdman won the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in part for his and Lee's research into plasticity.
How did Lee get into design? The Hong Kong native attended school in Britain before moving to the United States, to study architecture at Cornell University, in the mid-1980s. She spent four years at Hodgetts + Fung Design Associates in LA before completing a master's degree in design studies at Harvard University, in 2000. She founded LA-based design firm Plus Clover and ran it from 2001 to 2006. Lee is director of the Rice School of Architecture, China.
And Erdman? Erdman, who grew up in the American Midwest, saw in architecture a bridge between science and art, two of his passions. After completing a degree at Ohio State University, in 1993, Erdman worked as a design assistant at New York's Stan Allen Architect while pursuing his master's in architecture at Columbia University. Upon graduating, he founded design firm Servo with three college friends and was principal designer at the LA office until 2006.
What is davidclovers' current focus? 'Conceptually, we are interested in energy emission and the experience of it - how the tactile and visual quality of say, light, can create sensations and atmospheres beyond its lighting function,' says Lee.
Says Erdman: 'Practically, this means playing with light by reinventing the use of popular building materials - such as Corian, LED lighting and steel plates.'
What are they working on? Yud Yud (above) came out of a residential project in Texas called Lunar House, for which davidclovers is crafting a Corian exterior in collaboration with LA-based artist Casey Reas and DuPont China. The gate (Yud Yud) is made of Corian with embedded, time-sequenced LED lighting and serves as the firm's glowing Wan Chai storefront.