"(We) think of ourselves as being the equivalent of what we call the method actor." In Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray's explorative Studio Works practice and their SCI-Arc teaching careers, architecture stands as a dense field coded with meanings and implications that must be fully embraced to ever fully create. "A kind of 'genetic' strengthening occurs when the world we occupy is experienced, looked at, and learned from."

As an architectural practice, Studio Works is unusual in having won numerous awards and wide recognition for projects that not only have never been built but also were never intended to be built, as well as for its significant completed projects. The firm, of which Mangurian was a founder in 1969, is dedicated to its commitment to education, to its wider social goals, and to its belief in the necessity for a wide-ranging dialogue with a broader public. As Ray and Mangurian have written, "We believe that work needs to be grounded in order to resonate within a diverse culture. The first buildings known date from 300,000 years ago (Terra Amata - an archeological treasure). It is clear that the formation of our humanness is entwined with the making of buildings and furniture, the making of tools and utensils, and the making of clothing. When a cat jumps over a threshold, a deep instinct remains intact. We carry these same instincts with regard to the use of space and the things that occupy space. Our work attempts always to speak to these fundamental and deep instincts."

In the Milwaukee Montessori School (1998) their shoestring budget transformed particleboard, wheatboard, mdf, and osb into a life-instructive ceiling and wall patchwork for its students. It also teaches that invention is an important building tool. The West Los Angeles China blue-green-themed Raise-Up House (1993) sliced an existing 1,000-square-foot house from its foundations and flung it fifteen feet in the air (courtesy of sturdy railroad ties and a quake-free building season) to create an airy, well-detailed living space afforded by economy of construction. Their studies for the Museum of Jurassic Technology's façade in Culver City, California, became an assemblage more appropriately viewed within a museum. These have been published in the Mangurian/Ray-designed Wrapper (1999)-itself cloaked in a number of fluorescent-colored booksleeve "façades." Their gymnasium and ark library for the Rose and Alex Pilibos Armenian School have broken ground in Hollywood; a plan for a Los Angeles high school is also in the works. Photographs from more than a dozen summers surveying and planning Hadrian's Villa with graduate students in Tivoli, Italy, have been acquired by the Getty Center Archive. (Further bringing this scholarly, experiential work to life, olives from their grove near the Villa have been pressed and bottled into Tiburtini Olive Oil-Mangurian and Ray's own label.) "Architecture is an amazing way to be a participant in the world," says Ray. Both built and unbuilt studies have won the team numerous Progressive Architecture awards.