Leadership

About the Lead Architect

Alexis Rochas, Lead Architect Karlev began with a conviction Alexis Rochas has carried through his entire career: everyone deserves the luxury of space. Alexis Rochas is a technologist working at the intersection of architecture, computational design, and robotic fabrication. Architecture has traditionally treated design and construction as separate disciplines, handed from one specialist to the next. Alexis has spent two decades building the systems — geometric, material, and mechanical — that let the two operate as one.

From concert stages to city blocks

Before Karlev, Alexis founded Stereobot, where for more than a decade he has been rewriting what temporary architecture can do, engineering ambitious 3D spaceframe structures for concerts, art fairs, and public plazas. That work earned recognition well beyond the event world: a Merit Award from the West Side Urban Forum, the International Downtown Association's Pinnacle Award in Public Space, and Finalist honors at SXSW Place by Design, all in 2016. Earlier in his career, his work at SCI-Arc received a Design Award from the City of Los Angeles and the New York Society of Architects' M.W. Del Gaudio Award for Excellence in Total Design. Spaceframes taught him something the housing industry had missed. Structures that go up fast, span far, cost little, and come apart cleanly are not a compromise on design. They are a design discipline. Every joint has to be resolved once and then repeated perfectly, thousands of times.

A new tradition of building

Karlev is that discipline turned toward the American home. Alexis spent a decade in production research translating the founding thesis into a repeatable building system: a patented aluminum spaceframe, a fixed material palette, a 6-axis robotic fabrication line, and the Discovery, Documentation, and Delivery process that ties them together. Karlev is not a single house, and it is not a catalog of modular components bolted into arrangements. It is a rethinking of how homes get built, one that yields an unusual combination of low cost, flexibility, and speed, and lets the team detail a plan to fit almost any need, lot, and budget. Too many affordable providers abstract architectural sensitivity away, defaulting to prefabricated boxes or conventional stick built plans. Karlev does the opposite. Some clients configure their own space online. Others work with the studio on a fully custom home. Either way, the empathy and intentionality that define Alexis's work are present in the result, because the system is what makes listening affordable.

Design led, operator run

Alexis leads the studio as Lead Architect and, as founder and CEO, carries the same accountability through the factory floor. He signs off on every plan set that leaves the studio and every unit that leaves the line. One team is accountable for the design language, the structural engineering, the HCD insignia plan approval under California's Factory Built Housing Program, and the assembly on your lot. There is no general contractor to hand off to, and no factory partner to blame.

• Architecture and product design in house, one language across the lineup
• Structural engineering to California seismic requirements on every unit
• Factory and site operations run by the same team that designs the units
• Discovery, Documentation, and Delivery managed end to end by Karlev