noroof architects

Margarita McGrath and Scott Oliver began working together in 1994 on the design of the ranch house project for a horse-loving client and her husband. A decade+ later, they completed their first permanant built work together (alas the ranch house remains unbuilt), and decided to call the collaboration noroof architects.

Scott and Margarita grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, but they didn’t meet until both had left the desert to see more of the world. Scott is the son of an architecture professor at Arizona State University; Margarita, the daughter of a contractor. Their paths crossed in 1993 at UCLA and three years later they found themselves living in Seoul, South Korea, practicing and teaching architecture. Scott & Margarita wrapped up the century with a move to New York City.

Margarita has worked as an architect while living in Europe and Asia. For the last eight years she has been practicing architecture in New York and teaching architecture in Blacksburg, VA. For her the work of noroof architects is an opportunity to realize an old school notion that teaching and making architecture go hand and hand. Recent work with students has been looking at opportunities for architecture to make broader public contributions, specifically by fostering terrains for learning. Margarita is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture + Design at Virginia Tech.

Scott has two decades of national and international design experience, for which he has received local and national design awards. Scott’s projects under other roofs range from a new city in the Middle East for half a million inhabitants to an energy efficient (“green”) service building for the Department of Design and Construction for the City of New York. Scott is committed to designing buildings that many can share, but enjoys the rigor of research-oriented and smaller-scale work.