Zac Cohen is a visionary force in contemporary architecture, known for his relentless pursuit of innovative, forward-thinking design that challenges the status quo.
In 2024, Cohen launched räkkhaus an international architecture and design studio based on the ethos that architecture is an act of connection, not just construction – the name räkkhaus is derived from the Finnish rakkaus (love) and the German haus (house).
A standout in the studio’s growing portfolio is Atari Hotels Phoenix, a high-profile project that exemplifies Cohen’s ability to merge storytelling, entertainment-first, with architectural and design innovation into a singular, emotionally resonant destination.
Read our interview with Zac to learn more about this exciting project, the evolution of architecture in the hospitality world and so much more.
Please tell us more about your path into architecture and the experiences that most influenced how you think about space, emotion and storytelling.
I didn’t go to architecture school. I don’t have a license hanging on my wall. I came to this sideways — through finance, through real estate, through getting on planes and staying gone for a long time. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, studied finance and real estate development. But the real education happened when I stopped following the script. I moved to Europe, lived there for over a decade, and traveled to more than fifty countries. And somewhere between the chaos of Mumbai and the silence of a crumbling chapel in rural Tuscany, the whole thing cracked wide open for me.
Frank Lloyd Wright called architecture the mother of all art. He was right — but I didn’t understand why until I felt it in my soul. It contains everything — sculpture, painting, light, sound, time, memory. It’s the only art form you physically inhabit. You can walk away from a painting. You can’t walk away from the city you live in. That’s power. And most of the industry treats it like a logistics problem.
What travel destroyed for me — and I mean that as a compliment — was the illusion that architecture is about aesthetics. Lose yourself in the Gothic Quarter in Barcelona. Stand on the walls of Jerusalem and observe. Sit on the waterfront in Bol, Croatia watching the Adriatic do what no architect ever could. Architecture isn’t about style. It’s about the relationship between a human body and the space it moves through. It can connect people or it can divide them. It can make you feel held or make you feel erased. That’s not design. That’s responsibility.
And if you want to talk about what I believe is the most important invention in human history — forget the iPhone, forget cars, or the internet — I’d point to the Italian piazza. A public space built for nothing more than the radical act of being together. Strangers sitting, arguing, flirting, existing alongside each other. No transaction. No agenda. Just presence. That’s architecture at its most powerful — not as a monument, but as an invitation. That idea is the beating heart of everything we do at räkkhaus.
You established räkkhaus in 2024. What was the lightbulb moment, and how has the journey unfolded so far?
There was no single lightbulb. I’d spent years working at the highest levels of international architecture — a globally recognized studio in Milan where I served as Director and then Principal. World-class projects. Brilliant people. I learned an enormous amount about what’s possible when architecture operates without fear. But I also learned what happens when complexity becomes the point. When the form starts serving the architect’s ego instead of the person walking through the door. It infuriated me.
I needed air. I needed simplicity. Not minimalism as a trend — simplicity as a philosophy. The courage to strip something back until only the essential remains. That’s harder than adding more. Any architect can add more. It takes nerve to take away.
räkkhaus was born from that hunger — and honestly, from a kind of creative impatience. I wanted a studio that leads with empathy, rather than spectacle. That treats simplicity as a radical act. That has zero interest in impressing other architects. We’re interested in moving human beings. Full stop.
We opened simultaneously in Phoenix and Helsinki in 2024 and have since expanded to Dallas and Madrid. We’ve assembled a team of architects from across Europe and the States who’ve lived it — different countries, different languages, same values. It’s been fast. Messy at times. But honest. Exactly how we like it.
The name räkkhaus combines the ideas of love and home. How does that philosophy translate into real-world architecture?
“Rakkaus” is Finnish for love. “Haus” is German for home.
Most architecture studios name themselves after the founder because architecture has a vanity problem. We named ours after the two things that actually matter — love and shelter. The most fundamental human needs.
In practice, that philosophy is ruthlessly simple: make someone feel something. Anyone with a software license and a big budget can build something that photographs well. The question we ask is different — does it move you when you walk through the door? Does it make you feel like you belong there? Does it hold you the way a home should, even if it’s a hotel or an office or an apartment building you’re renting for eleven months?
We start every project by listening. To the site, the community, the culture, the ghosts of what was there before. We immerse ourselves in the place before we draw a single line. Because a building that fails to understand the people it serves is just an expensive sculpture. And the world has enough of those.
You often describe architecture as an act of connection rather than construction. What does that mean in practice?
Construction is what keeps the rain out. Architecture is what makes you stop in a hallway you’ve walked through a hundred times and suddenly see it. That moment — that pause, that breath — that’s the whole game. The rest is engineering.
The industry is addicted to jargon right now. Sustainability. Innovation. Parametric this, computational that. And look, we use AI, we push technology as hard as anyone — but technology is a tool, not a personality. Rick Rubin said it best: the reason we go to the artists we go to is for their point of view — and AI has none. The destination is always a human being having an emotional response they didn’t expect. That’s it. Everything else is noise.
Luxury travel is increasingly driven by experience rather than excess. How has this shift changed the way you approach hotel design in particular?
The traditional model of luxury hospitality — spaces designed to make you feel small so you’ll think you’re somewhere important — that’s dead. The people shaping the future of travel want to be changed, not impressed.
Experience-driven design means the architecture itself can be the product. Not a container for amenities — the amenity. The way light moves through a corridor. The way a staircase forces you to slow down. Every one of those is a decision.
We approach hotel design by asking one question: what’s the human story this place is telling, and how does every square foot serve it? A beautiful room with a great view is forgettable. A place that takes you somewhere — emotionally, psychologically, spiritually — that’s the one you tell people about for the rest of your life. That’s what we’re after.
Please tell us more about the development of Atari Hotels Phoenix, particularly how storytelling and entertainment have been woven into the architecture itself.
It is not a themed hotel. It is not a giant arcade with beds. If that’s what you’re picturing, delete it. What we’re building is a world. A complete, immersive, architecturally uncompromising world that happens to have rooms you can sleep in.
The design draws from the visual language of Tron and Blade Runner — not as nostalgia, but as prophecy. The building is conceived as a glowing monolith of light and motion, rising from Roosevelt Row like a digital beacon announcing that Phoenix has arrived at the future. Over ninety thousand square feet of experience-driven space — a twenty-thousand-square-foot concert venue for two thousand people, an esports arena with a ten-thousand-square-foot sportsbook, immersive environments that merge gaming, music, and nightlife into something we haven’t named yet.
But here’s what separates this from spectacle: the integration is architectural, not decorative. Subtle references to Asteroids, Pong, Tetris are woven into the DNA of the building itself. The facade’s fractured patterning echoes pixel grids. Interior light bands create kinetic pathways like arcade circuitry. The Atari logo has been reimagined and stretched vertically into a luminous symbol that owns the skyline. And the LED-lit breezeway that slices through the tower’s base — a programmable, immersive passage — that’s a threshold. You cross it and you’re somewhere else.
Our goal was to fuse architecture with interaction. Not themed design — pure spatial innovation. A tower defined by motion, responsive surfaces, and a frame that glows with its own internal logic. This building generates culture. That’s the difference between world-building and wallpaper.
What design trends are you currently seeing in experiential hospitality that genuinely excite you?
The death of the passive guest.
For decades, hotels treated guests like audience members — sit here, eat this, look at that. The best new hospitality projects understand that people want to participate. They want to be inside the experience, absorbed by it.
I’m excited about immersive environments that blur the line between physical and digital — spaces that respond to your presence through sound and scale. Hotels functioning as cultural platforms — properties that host, curate, provoke, and occasionally make you a little uncomfortable in the best way.
I’m also deeply excited about the return of communal space done with intelligence and intention. People are starving for gathering — for places that facilitate real, unscripted human connection. The lobby as a living room. The rooftop as a town square. The corridor as a gallery. When you design for gathering, you design for memory. And memory is the ultimate luxury. No thread count competes with that.
Are there any trends you feel are overused or misunderstood within luxury hotel design?
Somewhere along the way, the industry decided that sophistication means sensory overload — more pattern, more texture, more objects, more visual noise competing for your attention. Most of the time it’s insecurity. A fear of silence. The architectural equivalent of someone who won’t stop talking because they’re afraid of what happens when the room goes quiet.
There is profound beauty in simplicity. A single material used with precision. A room where the light does all the work. A space that trusts you enough to give you nothing but itself. That takes more courage than throwing the entire catalog at the wall and calling it curated.
What advice would you give to hotel brands looking to create emotionally resonant spaces rather than visually impressive ones?
Start from the human level and expand out.
Most hotel design starts macro — site plan, massing study, maximizing buildable area. Then the human experience gets reverse-engineered into whatever space is left over. It’s backwards. And it’s why most hotels feel the same regardless of how different they look.
Flip it. Start with the moment a person crosses the threshold. What do they feel? What do they hear? How does the light land? Design the emotional journey first, then build the architecture around it. When you begin with the human body and the human heart as your unit of measure, everything else falls into place. It stops feeling designed and starts feeling discovered.
The brands that will define the next decade are the ones that make a person feel, on some primal level, that this space was made for them. That takes radical empathy. And the courage to design from the inside out.
Luxury is highly subjective. What does it mean to you personally?
Time. Luxury is time. It’s time with the people you care about in a space that isn’t asking anything of you.
I’ve stayed in some of the most expensive hotels in the world and forgotten them by the time I arrived at the airport. But I remember standing alone in the Rila Monastery in the Bulgarian mountains with nothing but cold air and six-hundred-year-old walls and thinking — this is it. This is what we should be building toward. Not louder. Quieter.
Finally, what is your life motto, if you have one?
Ignore the noise. I’d rather be honest than liked.
I’ve never been good at performing. Never wanted to be. Everyone’s curating — saying the right thing, wearing the right reference, waiting to see what’s safe before they open their mouth. I’d rather say the wrong thing honestly than the right thing strategically. That’s how I travel. That’s how I build. That’s how I run a company. You say what you mean. You mean what you say. If it costs you the room, it wasn’t your room. The people who get it will find you. The rest were never going to anyway. Stay direct. Stay grounded. Stay willing to be disliked. Ignore the bull$h!t.
Discover More: www.rakk.haus/about
