Low Design Office
LowDO | Guadalupe River House, New Braunfels, TX. Image credit: Casey Dunn
The Architectural League’s annual Emerging Voices program spotlights North American architects, landscape architects, and urban designers who have significant bodies of realized work and the potential to influence their field.
Low Design Office won a 2021 award.
Ryan Bollom and DK Osseo-Asare co-founded Low Design Office in Austin, Texas, and Tema, Ghana, in 2006. Their work is guided by the principle that transformative innovation “most often originates when the creator must overcome limited means and resources to provide meaning in their work.” Working in the US and Africa, the firm strives to deliver high-impact design through “low-resource, low-tech, low-carbon strategies,” with the goal of achieving an integrative systems approach to building in a process that bridges design and construction—what they call “low design,” realizing more with less.
Projects include:
- Dakota Mountain Residence, Dripping Springs, TX
- Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform, Accra, Ghana
- Guadalupe River House, New Braunfels, TX
Bollom earned a BS in engineering from Duke University and an MArch from Harvard University. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Princeton University.
Osseo-Asare received a BA in engineering and an MArch from Harvard University. A Fulbright Scholar and TED Global Fellow, he is an assistant professor of architecture and engineering design at Penn State University.
In 2020 Low Design Office was named one of Domus’s 50 Best Architecture Firms, received a Le Monde Smart Cities Urban Innovation Award for Citizen Engagement, and won two AIA Austin Design Awards.
More information
- Low Design Office, Architect Magazine
- Low Design Office: ‘For our generation, the only way to be radical is to build,’ The Architectural Review
- low design office combines two rectangular wooden volumes for river house in texas, designboom