Our Story

We are an interdisciplinary design studio uniting architects, urbanists, graphic designers, product designers and visual communicators in a single practice. We call this discipline experience masterplanning — urban analytics, destination strategy, communication design and spatial design, approaching every place from multiple disciplinary angles at once.

Spaceagency was founded in 2010 by Peter Feldmann and Sarah Manning, who came to the same idea from different directions. Peter, a German architect, had been working at UNStudio, WilkinsonEyre, Aedas and OMA on buildings and masterplans at urban scale. Sarah, an American based in London, had been working at Space Syntax on computational models of how people move through and interact with space. The question they kept returning to was the same: why did some places feel instinctively legible, while others didn't — and could that be designed for?

Their first commission was a wayfinding strategy developed alongside Zaha Hadid Architects for a large masterplan in Cairo. It established the approach the studio still follows: beginning with the person moving through a place rather than the plan above it, and working across every scale from urban strategy to the details a person reads from arm's length.

Fifteen years on, Spaceagency has studios in London, Milan and Guangzhou, a team of around 50 designers and researchers from 19 countries, and a portfolio spanning three consecutive World Expos, Riyadh's giga-projects, and major transport, cultural and commercial projects across Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Our Vision

We believe the human experience of a space is paramount. We design this experience from the bottom up, beginning with the person moving through a place rather than the plan above it.

Our team combines architecture and urban design with wayfinding and graphic communication. We analyse journeys to find the moments where people and place meet, then choreograph a consistent narrative across them — one that makes a space engaging, intuitive and enjoyable to move through. Working closely with our clients, we treat that journey as the thing being designed, not a by-product of the building.

We help clients make complex places simple, weaving each site's heritage and culture into the way people move through it — working at the intersection of brand, built environment and human movement, the point at which a place either makes sense or it doesn't.

Delivering this means thinking across scales at once, from urban masterplanning and systems design down to the products and graphics people encounter day to day — from North America's West Coast to Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District and Riyadh's Expo 2030, the same ethos and discipline at different ends of the world.

We are driven by a passion for excellence and for re-imagining conventional ways of working, and we collaborate with like-minded architects, developers, brands and municipalities around the world.

We create the user interface for the built environment.

Chris Lepine
Zaha Hadid Architects

Our Work

We help our clients make complex places simple, weaving each site's heritage and culture into the way people move through it.

Our work sits at the intersection of brand, built environment and human movement — the point at which a place either makes sense or it doesn't.

Delivering this means thinking across scales at once: from urban masterplanning and systems design down to the products, graphics and details a person reads from arm's length. From North America's West Coast to Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District and Riyadh's Expo 2030 - the same ethos, the same discipline, different ends of the world.

Founders

Peter Feldmann is co-founder and Design Director of Spaceagency. A German architect and urban designer, he leads the studio's creative direction across wayfinding, identity, public realm and experience masterplanning.

Before founding Spaceagency, Peter worked at OMA, UNStudio, Future Systems and WilkinsonEyre — on projects that shaped his conviction that design must operate simultaneously at strategic, spatial and human scales. At UNStudio, he worked on the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart; at Future Systems, he conceptualised the Central Embassy tower in Bangkok. In London, he served as project architect for the Emirates Air Line cable car across the Thames, completed for the London 2012 Olympics. He went on to win the Europan competition twice, in its seventh and eighth cycles — an early proving ground for the independent practice that would become Spaceagency.

At Spaceagency, together with Sarah Manning, Peter has grown the studio from a two-person start-up into a specialist practice with studios in London, Milan and Guangzhou. He leads many projects from start to finish and sets the studio's overall design direction, including the Yas Island Welcome identity, the wayfinding strategy for Expo 2030 Riyadh, the Galaxy Entertainment Phase 3C complex in Macau, Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District, Eastland in Melbourne, and Riyadh's Sports Boulevard. Across these projects he has developed an approach that moves from urban-scale strategy to the details read from arm's length — treating movement, narrative and identity as a single design problem.

Peter has taught architecture and urban design since 2009 at the Bartlett UCL, Cardiff University, UC Berkeley and the Royal Danish Academy. In 2019, he was selected by Goldman Sachs for its 10,000 Small Businesses Growth programme at Oxford's Saïd Business School.

Sarah Manning is a co-founder and Strategy Director of Spaceagency, where she has set the company’s direction in experience design, wayfinding and strategic planning. She began her career in user interface design in Silicon Valley, before working at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on travelling exhibitions. She later joined Space Syntax Ltd, a spin-off of University College London’s Advanced Architectural Studies, where she became Associate Director, applying research into spatial structure and user behaviour to complex urban environments. She holds a Master’s Degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the Design Research Laboratory at the Architectural Association and graduated magna cum laude from Duke University with a BA in International Comparative Studies.

At Spaceagency, Sarah has led strategic planning and experience design for complex, multi-stakeholder projects for international companies and cities, bringing together user experience, information design and urbanism. She is a joint author of The Spaceagency Guide to Wayfinding. Her London Pedestrian Routemap was exhibited at the New London Architecture “Public City” exhibition and published in Time Out London and GQ Style’s “Blueprint for London” edition. Her work has also been exhibited at the Design Museum as part of Woman at Work and at Somerset House. Sarah was a founding Trustee of Architecture for Humanity UK, where she jointly established a humanitarian lecture series, and in 2017 was selected as a judge for the D&AD international design awards and became a UK Finalist for HSBC’s Women in Business Forward Ladies award.

Sarah is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture and has taught and lectured internationally throughout her career. She has been an examiner at the Royal College of Art and a Unit Master in the Master of Urban Design courses at the Bartlett/UCL and Cardiff University, as well as teaching architecture at the University of East London and Istituto Marangoni. She has been invited as a guest lecturer and critic at UC Berkeley, Milan Polytechnic, the Royal College of Art and the Architectural Association, and has lectured at the Australian Institute of Architects National Conference 2018, XIV Quito Architectural Biennale, the University of Brighton’s Politics of Space Symposium, the Space Syntax 6th International Symposium in Istanbul, London Biennale, Design Junction, Clerkenwell Design Week and the RIBA People in Space Group.