FIRSTLIGHT is an architecture practice based in Vienna and Manama.
For more than thirty years the Vienna studio has designed social housing, kindergartens and new urban districts across Vienna and Lower Austria. The Manama studio brings that experience to Bahrain.
Fouad Ismail designs rooms that produce a state.
The foundation is a sculptor's formal language: reduction, mass, geometric authority, permanence. Its origin is ancient Egyptian and North African iconography and the Islamic geometric tradition — not as citation, but as native language. Its training is European modernism: Vienna, the discipline of reduction, the precision of the joint.
The work operates in the threshold between sculpture and architecture. Not building, not object — but spatial conditions that act on the body before the mind reads them.
Julia Knötzl Ismail studied architecture at TU Wien and is a licensed architect in Austria. She led the family practice in Vienna, working on housing and new city districts across Vienna's urban extension areas, before moving to Manama to lead First Light. Her work centres on dense, affordable housing built around daylight, shared space and everyday life, and on how new neighbourhoods grow into places people belong to.
Josef Knötzl founded his practice in Vienna in 1994. Since then it has played a key role in shaping Vienna's Stadterweiterungsgebiete, the planned urban extension areas where the city builds its new districts. It has designed more than 13,000 homes across Vienna and Lower Austria, most of them social and subsidized housing, along with thirteen kindergartens. A published monograph documents much of this work.
First Light W.L.L.
[Building, Road, Block]
Manama
Kingdom of Bahrain
+973 3515 7965
firstlight.bh@gmail.com
jkiarchitecture
Versbachgasse 2
1130 Vienna
Austria
office@jkiarchitecture.com