CRAB is the Cook-Robotham Architectural Bureau Ltd. It is a different type of set-up from most others. In mannerism it might seem to resemble a workshop or art studio. Yet it produces buildings of a substantial scale – a residential block of 97 apartments and shops in Madrid, a University Department of 21,000 m2 in Vienna is nearly completed, a new school of architecture is under construction and a municipal theatre for Verbania in Piedmont, Italy is in the planning stage. Currently, CRAB Studio is a full service practice with a team of 10 permanent architectural designers, architects and supporting staff. The studio has several distinctive characteristics: First, it is a very close and creative studio where tight groups of people who know each others’ work well and have mutual respect. Second, it is based upon ideas and invention – the technical aspects folded into the aesthetic aspects, the tectonic aspects folded into the operational aspects. Third, the studio has a long history of thinking-up new ways of doing things, creating new prototypes, evolving new ‘devices’ that don’t get trapped by the traditional categorisation of ‘working parts’ or by notions of the ‘correctness’ of this or that.