DERMAN VERBAKEL ARCHITECTURE is a design firm founded in 2001 in New York City by Elie Derman and Els Verbakel. Our office specializes in urban design and contemporary housing with projects in New York, Belgium, Israel and Morocco.

Through our work we developed new approaches to housing and urban design that offer flexible, immediate and tangible design methodologies in which landscape is a primary design component.

Our approach engages nature, land segments and artificial landscapes in architectural and urban environments, as spaces of passage and encounter. In this process, we continuously search for the meeting point between the collective and the private. We interweave collective and private spaces to create a dynamic field of social interaction that we believe to be at the heart of a well-functioning space. Our design approach maintains an open end for tensions and dialogs in order to anticipate the future without confining it.