The New York architecture firm headed by Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto is driven by nothing less ambitious than a reconceptualization of the city for an age of the (post) post-modern. "Due to the ever-increasing saturation of global systems within urban environments," they write, "the global is no longer an abstraction and the local is no longer local."

This willingness to imagine the "difficult whole," to bridge urban systems that have fallen into stratification and to reimagine the concept of place in an age of endless mobility, has put the firm at the forefront of both conceptual and built urban architectural practice. The firm's far-reaching inquiries have been displayed in a number of prestigious international competitions, including the Van Alen Institute's East River Parkway competition in New York, the Cardiff Bay (Wales) Opera House competition, the Yokohama Port Terminal competition, and a plan for reimagining the urban fabric of post-Ceaucescu Bucharest. In built projects such as the Spence Center for Women's Health in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the firm employed sculptural elements and flowing forms to bring enlivening variety and a necessary demarcation of public and private to a restrictively small space.

Reiser and Umemoto have taught at Columbia University and other institutions, and Jesse Reiser has been honored with the Prix de Rome in Architecture and a number of grants. Their work has been exhibited in shows in London, Kyoto, and Amsterdam, among other places, and is featured in a monograph published by Academy Editions.