ARI BAKHTIARI.

grounded in emerging technologies, art direction and material studies, his work focuses on designing and developing worlds that translate complex ideas into felt, visual systems.

ari’s relationship with making began as a child, watching his grandmother sew and alter her wardrobe. he started by cutting fabric and stapling pieces together to make a shirt, eventually revealing an entrepreneurial instinct as he began selling shirts at school during lunch. growing up at the foothills of america’s largest urban nature preserve, he spent much of his time exploring outdoors, where his fascination with materials and building took root. he would gather rocks and sticks to build miniature structures he called “ant hotels.”

the curiosity and impulse to create that shaped those early years have stayed with him throughout his life. a deep desire to learn has led him to seek out apprenticeships and mentorship, and at times to take a leap of faith, trying things without knowing how and learning the hard way. through these experiences, he has developed a deep understanding of design across apparel, web, and architecture.

ari went on to launch his apparel label, academy by aris, and co-found mka house, a visual and experiential design house, and wolf, an experimental production company making films, campaigns, and visual archives.

academy by aris/ / los milics/ oakley/ orbital/ rema/ shoku la/ sustenance

Amansol

Location: Sonoran Desert, Arizona Positioning: Aman ultra-reclusive tier Scale: 800 acres, 20 suites

Amansol is a reclusive, monastic luxury wellness resort carved into the floor of the Sonoran Desert. Conceived as a sanctuary that disappears into the earth rather than rising above it, the resort inverts the traditional resort typology – guests descend into silence. Architecture is subterranean and brutalist: raw poured concrete, rammed earth, and Arizona sandstone, weathered to feel as ancient as the landscape itself.

Neo-Southwest

a long way from home, a long way to go

Shoku LA

Location: Los Angeles Positioning: Experiential Dining Scale: 2,296 S.F.

This project took shape during my apprenticeship at Arrogant Studio, under the guidance of Principal Director Trevor Bernardo. Together, we developed what would become Shoku's inaugural brick-and-mortar concept, its first experiential home in Los Angeles.

Shoku is a members-only, referral-based private dining concept in Los Angeles. There is no walk-in location – the team arrives with an entire kitchen in tow, cooking a multi-course tasting menu on-site, wherever the client calls home. The cuisine reinterprets high-end American comfort food through a Japanese lens; i.e., a lobster roll or Philly cheesesteak rebuilt from the ground up with rarefied ingredients: Hokkaido uni, top-grade Japanese toro and A5 wagyu, Umbrian truffle, premium caviar. It sits at the very top of Los Angeles's hidden, address-withheld dining tier – a category defined as much by what it withholds as by what it serves.

The question we had to sit with: what does a physical location look like for a company whose entire premise is not a restaurant, referral only? How do you take an experience that lived in someone's home, arriving in a client's kitchen, built around a table that didn't exist until that night, and hold it inside 2,296 square feet without losing the thing that made it work? The private dining experience is a sequence: anticipation, then ceremony, then release. We worked backward, using the structure of the dinner itself as the floor plan. Arrival became a room. The table became the fixed point everything orbits. The ending became somewhere the evening could exhale.

Arrival – The Bar

The ritual begins the moment the guest steps from the outside world and into anticipation. In the original Shoku dinners, that threshold was a welcome drink handed over the moment the brigade finished setting up, a small, deliberate gesture that told you the evening had already started before a single course arrived. Here, that gesture gets its own destination. The bar is a held breath: dim, unhurried, built to slow a guest down rather than move them through. It's the opening scene.

Dining – The Ceremony

This is the translation of the "table-as-altar" – the same instinct that had chefs presenting live shellfish tableside, shaving truffle in front of a guest, or steeping a four-year kombu in a teacup before turning it into rice. In the home version, that theater happened because the kitchen came to you; here, the architecture does the same work by design. The table becomes the fixed point everything else orbits. Light does the choreography that a chef's presentation once did – pulling focus, marking the next destination, compressing time the way a tasting menu naturally does when a guest stops checking the clock.

Finale – The Lounge

Every Shoku dinner ended on a single, deliberate closing note, the milk-and-cookies bite built to be eaten in one motion, the signal that the ceremony was complete but the evening wasn't. It's the release after the compression of the dining room: softer light, looser seating, a space that gives permission to linger the way the private dinners would naturally run long into the night.

The most faithful translation may be the one guests never consciously register. The original team moved through a home with complete self-sufficiency – present only for as long as the evening required, then gone without a trace, so that nothing remained but the ritual itself. The concealed service paths carry that same discipline into the architecture. Darkness holds the seams; light marks only what the guest is meant to find next. The back-of-house operates on the same principle that once defined the experience – essential to everything, visible in nothing. Together, the rooms trace the ritual's own three-act structure – anticipation, ceremony, release – the architecture now performing, in fixed form, what once had to be assembled and dissolved in a single night.

Ritual Tools

Every object that meets the hand is conceived as part of the ritual. The silverware and plates are custom formed for this space alone, each piece carrying subtle variation, weight, and irregularity. No two are exactly alike yet together they speak the same language as the room. Edges feel intentional, balances are considered, and surfaces catch light differently with every movement.

These tools are an extension of the architecture itself. The way a fork rests between the fingers. The curve of a plate guiding the eye toward the food. The sound of metal meeting stone. Every detail is taken into consideration.

Sustenance.

character and voice development for the episode's protagonist, Yakov.

Rema

Academy by Aris.

Academy by Aris apparel and accessories arranged in a circular concrete space

founder and creative director

Academy by Aris hooded apparel among concrete blocks, first pose

Academy by Aris hooded apparel among concrete blocks, second pose

Academy by Aris hooded apparel among concrete blocks, third pose

Obelisk

OBELISK is a geospatial architecture simulation where every structure is anchored to a real location on Earth. Instead of building in a fictional world, players claim authentic geographic coordinates, study the surrounding landscape, and construct monumental architecture that becomes a permanent part of a shared global map. Each project begins by selecting an unclaimed coordinate. The environment is reconstructed from real-world terrain and contextual data, allowing users to understand the site’s topography, climate, and cultural setting before designing. Architecture is created through a minimalist massing system using pure geometric volumes, emphasizing proportion, composition, and spatial thinking over decoration.

Once a design is committed, it cannot be altered. The monument remains permanently tied to its location while an autonomous generation system gradually transforms the initial massing into a fully realized structure. Materials, structural articulation, ornamentation, and environmental weathering emerge over time, making every return visit reveal a more complete architectural expression. As the world expands, thousands of monuments occupy real coordinates across the planet, forming a living atlas of player-created architecture. Every structure tells the story of a specific place, a unique design decision, and the passage of time. OBELISK is a persistent architectural world where geography, permanence, and patience become fundamental parts of the creative process.

Oakley

O Studio.

Orbital workstation in its closed circular configuration

Orbital workstation with one segment opened

Orbital workstation with separated segments

a workstation reimagined for digital and physical making.

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01Studio “O”

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Studio “O”

Studio O — workstation with separated segments

audio reactive 3d audio visualizer