Truth Through Making: Experiencing Design with Joey Gamblin
For over a decade at Multistudio, Senior Designer Joey Gamblin has created work that is focused on craftsmanship, precision, and an inherent connection to place. Born and raised in Northwest Arkansas, Joey attended the Fay Jones School of Architecture where he developed a work approach rooted in exploration and the vernacular of place.
During his third year of architecture school, Joey was introduced to the Latin phrase “verum ipsum factum,” which means “truth through making.” Now tattooed on his forearm, he considers it his mantra — a constant reminder of his belief that gaining knowledge is an experiential process, and through building, one achieves understanding.
Joey has always been interested in tactile processes, from childhood through adolescence when he began working for his stepfather in the construction industry. His interests in tinkering, experimenting, learning, and creating contribute to his detail-oriented architectural sensibilities. Joey describes his design approach as coming from “a maker’s mindset,” with an emphasis on physical experimentation, media, and models.
Working to establish a strong design language in a project’s early stages helps Joey create a foundational frame of reference that he can revisit throughout the design process. As he explains, a project carries a continuous thread of design thinking that re-emerges throughout its lifespan as an embedded memory, helping guide outcomes and solutions.
We sat down with Joey to learn more about his design approach and how it folds into Multistudio’s culture.
Joey Gamblin: The things that I think about all the time are scale, proportion, and materiality. When you work through those ideas within the context of a particular project site, you begin to establish a relationship with place and to understand what does and does not make sense for a design.
Developing strong material and spatial logics are also important considerations. Understanding what a material is doing in a project, how it is used, and where it shows up creates clarity in design thinking and approach.
Using too many materials generally complicates this effort. Similarly with spaces: how you shape, order, and connect them — how you circulate through them, bring in light, or connect to the exterior — can define how a building is used and experienced. Thinking through these lenses is how you build a strong design language.
JG: One of my favorite tools to explore a design is a section drawing. Plans are great to understand relationships between spaces, but section is inherently the only two-dimensional spatial drawing that we use in architectural design. It can describe more about how a space might feel than a plan drawing.
Printing out drawings gives team members an opportunity to experiment with different media, layering over the drawings to create depth, expansion, contraction, and new ways of thinking about spatial interactions.
Nothing is off the table in the early stages of design – I encourage people to be fast, loose, and analog. I believe the best way to home in on an idea is to quickly rule out as many things as possible. This experimentation is a central part of our design practice in Phoenix, and it feeds directly into the project walls we create for all of our work.
JG: Project walls provide a shared space for creativity and experimentation throughout the entire lifespan of a project. We spend a lot of time as a team pinning stuff up and living with it, thinking about it, pulling it down, manipulating it, especially early in the process. We call it “working out loud” and it’s something that we've built into our practice.
This process helps capture all the different ideas floating around and puts them in one place for people to see. It’s beautiful to see that visible, tactile craziness of literally building an idea. Clients and potential clients who visit our studio are always drawn to the pin up walls.
I think disconnecting from the computer at the beginning for a little bit and seeing what happens when we work directly with media can lead to unprecedented outcomes. In school, we weren’t allowed to use the computer until our second year. There was always a heavy emphasis on the making and the hand. I think not letting go of these inherently tactile tools is super important even if there are new ways to do things.
JG: I feel like the most successful architecture is architecture that feels like it belongs, is community owned, and is of place. I think to resonate with users and clients, establishing those relational elements like proportion, scale, and materiality creates a sense of belonging that is an essential piece of creating successful work.
I went to school in and practiced in Northwest Arkansas, which is a very specific place. It isn’t a massive metropolitan area like Phoenix—there are a lot of strong vernacular references and it exists in its own subculture of architecture that is beautiful, impactful, and groundbreaking, without any self-consciousness.
Fay Jones, Warren Segraves, and Marlon Blackwell have done really incredible work in Arkansas outside of the ‘cultural fashion centers’ of the U.S. To me, it was a daily reminder that the most successful work in a place is of that place.
JG: Our team’s work on the West Valley Animal Care Center exemplified this approach. We were asked to transform a 14-acre site in west Phoenix into a facility that can effectively and empathetically serve hundreds of dogs, staff, visitors and volunteers.
Located in Glendale, a historically agricultural suburb of Phoenix, we felt like there were strong references and opportunities to take an agrarian approach with the design. There was a lot of research into barns and equestrian structures that bring in light and air and provide space for the animals. With the project’s repetitive nature, we were interested in developing an economy of means through details and materials. It really became an exercise of quiet restraint.
We decided early on that we should spread out and make use of the land. That's where our team decided the thesis was “land as an instrument of care.” That means a lot of things, but in the most practical sense, it means providing space, light, and both natural and constructed shade, while using the landscape to allow connection, buffer views between animals, and inform a thoughtful layout.
JG: I don't believe that good work is created in a vacuum. No project that we build is representative of one person. It's a collection of efforts and a shared investment along the way. When I’m leading a team, I embody that through strong communication skills and constant collaboration, giving trust where it's due to people who I know can do the job and help make the work better.
Collaboration often means trusting a teammate to do their best work, both individually and collectively, taking separate pieces of a project when the need arises and coming back together with adaptability and curiosity front of mind.
When you work in an interdisciplinary environment like we do, leveraging the talents and abilities of people on your team to push things further helps reveal things about a project that may not have been apparent initially. When you get more voices and fresh perspectives involved, that’s when opportunity arises.
It’s important to occasionally come up for air, take a step back, and receive criticism. When people feel invested in a project, when they feel like part of a team that cares about their ideas and their voice, they create better work.
