

Who We Are and What We Do
Plural is a studio for critical inquiry, publishing and architectural Design. Co-founders Anna Kostreva and Alex Head are dedicated to cultural production, experienced in practising across interdisciplinary fields with wide ranging collaborations. They have combined their forces to advocate for intellectual and artistic rigour.
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Anna Kostreva
(1985, USA/GERMANY) is an architectural designer, artist, writer, researcher, and educator. She is in charge of the build side of Plural Studio.
Anna works to promote natural materials and sustainable methods in the built environment; for example, celebrating the maintenance of older buildings, incorporating permaculture concepts into design thinking and looking for ways to avoid waste and resource extraction in a building’s life-cycle. She understands that the transition to more sustainable building will require making time and space for learning, discussion, and collaboration between clients, users, trades people, experts as well as the more-than-human.
Driven by her passion for architecture and art, she is most inspired by acts of learning and creativity. She has published three books which illustrate her visions of urban life: Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows with Plural Studio in 2023, Three Pathways to Get Anywhere in 2015 with Rough Beast, and Berlin: A Morphology of Walls in 2014. She also produces the interview series “Recast by Design” on sub_ʇxǝʇ radio, with thematic focus on solidarity, politics, and sustainability in cities. In 2021 she co-founded a neighbourhood climate action group (Klima und Kiez) in Berlin, focused on local energy use, maintaining green spaces and encouraging urban biodiversity. She is currently working with the activist group Architects4Future.
Anna is a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Architecture, NYC, and the recipient of a 2009 Fulbright Grant for research on post-apartheid urbanism in Johannesburg, South Africa. While working in offices in Berlin, Germany, from 2010-2017, she collaborated on award winning competitions with SMAQ, was a project architect for the design and construction of the Mehr! Theater Hamburg with F101, and planned all of the permanent furniture for the National Museum for Art and Design in Oslo with Kleihues-Schuwerk. She has held teaching and research positions at the Royal College of Art in London, the Berlin International University for Applied Sciences, the University of Bath in England, the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany, the Humboldt University in Berlin, and the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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Alex Head
(1983, UK/Germany) is an interdisciplinary artist interested in creating non-hierarchical networks of artists, researchers and citizens. His focus within Plural Studio is the publishing wing.
From radio stations to project coordination his work engages with people, ideas and cooperative solutions. He has worked across the fields of youth and migrant theater, commissioned public artwork, radio production and curation and numerous panel discussions concerning racial politics, land rights and knowledge production.His 2021 book Ricochet - Cultural Epigenetics and the Philosophy of Change, has drawn approval from artistic, scientific and anthropological quarters.
Here Comes Trouble, An Inquiry into Art, Magic and Madness as Deviant Knowledge, the author’s MA thesis, is in its third print and has sold over 1300 copies worldwide.
His forthcoming book is 1001 Accurate Memories on Plural Studio (2025). The project represents a seven year odyssey birthed from an artist’s blood, guts and tears. A series of insights into class, disability and trauma are presented with drawings, sketches and photographs. Having lived in Berlin for 14 years, the author has developed a critical view of Germany and its 'memory culture'. His investigation of traumatic memory leads to the proposal that today's Germany, which professes to be actively committed to ‘memory culture’, develops this approach to one of ‘traumatic memory culture’ - insofar as traumatic memories are often more precise than those of everyday, non-traumatic experiences.
Head co-founded the Wasteland Twinning Network, a transdisciplinary network for parallel research into urban wastelands.He studied a Bachelors of Arts in Sculpture & Environmental Art at The Glasgow School of Art (2007), including an exchange programme at Pratt University, New York (2005). He attained a Masters at Raumstrategien (Spatial Strategies), focusing on Fine Art and Political Theory, at Weißensee School of Art, Berlin (2016).
He is the founder of subtext radio in Berlin.
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