Partners Joe Powers and Jeffrey Brown founded Powers Brown Architecture in 1999. The firm has received numerous awards for architecture, urban design and interior design. Recent projects include the METRO Light Rail Facility in Houston, the McAllen office for FBI resident agents and the RTRON Corporate Headquarters in Stafford. Houston, the base city for the practice, is not unique in its commodity and consumption gluttony. How to critically engage these issues becomes the nexus of each design problem. The firm works to explore the separation of form and image by exploiting the forces that produce the automatic message of the status quo. This involves submission to those forces as authentic and as having cultural effect.