nARCHITECTS

Recorded on October 21, 2025. Read a transcript at the bottom of the page.

Mimi Hoang and Eric Bunge co-founded nARCHITECTS in 1999. In their 20-plus years of practice, they have produced a vast body of work, including housing projects and institutional buildings. nARCHITECTS’s prefab micro-unit housing project, Carmel Place, was the first such apartment building in New York City, which helped change the zoning resolution for micro-units. In recent years, they have designed a series of pavilions dedicated to stewarding ecology, natural elements, heritage, and multiple publics. These include the ResilienCity Park Pavilion in Hoboken, NJ, the Gansevoort Peninsula Pavilion and the A/D/O Design Center, both in New York City, and the Jones Beach Energy and Nature Center in Wantagh, NY. nARCHITECTS was the recipient of The Architectural League’s Emerging Voices Award in 2006. More recently, they won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture in 2016, and they were named New York State AIA Firm of the Year in 2017. In 2023, nARCHITECTS received the National Design Award in Architecture. Their ongoing projects include an affordable senior housing project in New York City and a project for the Teatown Lake Reservation Nature and Education Center, among others.

About I Would Prefer Not To

Conceived and produced by MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab and presented with The Architectural League, I Would Prefer Not To¹Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street,” The Piazza Tales (1856). tackles a usually unexamined subject: the refusal of an architectural commission. Why do architects make the decision to forfeit the possibility of work? At what point is a commission not worth it? When in one’s career is it necessary to make such a decision? Whether concealed out of politeness or deliberately shielded from public scrutiny, architects’ refusals usually go unrecorded by history, making them difficult to analyze or learn from. In this series of recorded interviews, I Would Prefer Not To aims to shed light on the complex matrix of agents, stakeholders, and circumstances implicated in every piece of architecture. The podcast won the 2025 AIA Architecture in Media Award, a prize recognizing contributions that elevate and challenge architectural discourse.

Transcript

This transcript was created using speech-to-text AI software and was lightly edited for continuity. The text may not accurately capture all information or aspects of the conversation.

Ana Miljački  00:00

Hello, and thank you for tuning in. I’m Ana Miljacki, Professor of Architecture at MIT and Director of the Critical Broadcasting Lab. On behalf of the Architectural League of New York and the Critical Broadcasting Lab, I welcome you to our architecture podcast series titled I Would Prefer Not To. I Would Prefer Not To is an oral history project conducted through audio interviews on the topic of perhaps the most important kind of refusal in architects’ toolboxes: refusal of the architectural commission. By definition, the topic of refusal stays hidden from public scrutiny and thus also hidden from history. Withdrawals of this kind tend not to leave paper trails and are not easy to examine or learn from, and yet the lessons contained in architects’ deliberations about and decisions not to engage are politically relevant and urgent. Decisions not to engage a commission, or types of commissions, or commissions with certain characteristics inevitably forfeit potential profit, placing other values above it—at least momentarily. 

Today, I’m talking to Mimi Hoang and Eric Bunge. Hello, Mimi and Eric. It’s great to reconvene like this. Mimi Hoang and Eric Bunge co-founded nARCHITECTS in 1999, which is now a 15-person, Brooklyn-based architectural studio working very locally but also across the U.S. and internationally on, as their website describes, “new buildings and transformations of both buildings and public spaces.” Their 2018 monograph Buildings and Almost Buildings also adds a few more important qualifiers to the kinds of buildings they work on—ones that I hope we’ll discuss. In their own origin story, their P.S.1 bamboo installation Canopy continues to play a symbolic and paradigmatic role. Canopy was followed by the Switch Building and Gallery in Manhattan. In the 20-plus years of their practice, they have produced a vast body of work, including houses, housing, and institutional buildings—all extremely consistent in their conceptual and tectonic rigor and aesthetic sensibility. nARCHITECTS’ prefab micro-unit housing project Carmel Place was the first such apartment building in New York City and helped change the zoning resolution surrounding micro-units. In recent years, they have produced a series of pavilions dedicated to stewarding ecology, natural elements, heritage, and multiple publics. These include the Resilient City Park Pavilion in Hoboken, the Gansevoort Peninsula Pavilion in New York City, the Jones Beach Energy and Nature Center in New York, as well as the Design Center in Greenpoint, A/D/O.

They have both been teaching studios at Columbia University—Mimi previously taught at Yale and Harvard, while Eric has taught at Parsons School of Design, RISD, Barnard College, Harvard, Yale, Université de Montréal, UT Austin, and the University of Toronto.

They have been collecting accolades over the years, and I will only mention a few. nARCHITECTS was the recipient of the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices Award in 2006. More recently, in 2016, they won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture, and in 2017 they were named New York State AIA Firm of the Year. In 2023, nARCHITECTS received the National Design Award in Architecture. Their recent residential work has been featured in major design journals, and they currently have several projects in the works, including elderly housing in New York City, a project for the Teton Lake Reservation, and others.

We’ll talk about some of these, but let’s start where we usually do. As you know, Mimi and Eric, we’ve been beginning these conversations by talking about the most memorable decision not to engage—or to drop—a commission. Do you have any examples you’d like to share with us? And if that has not happened yet, can you imagine it happening, and on what grounds?

Eric Bunge  04:22

Well, first of all, we have limited agency in refusing, because we don’t usually get approached—we pursue. Most of our projects are won through a public kind of RFP process, where we’re already making a choice at the outset that we want to work on that type of project. Of course, there are moments when we’re in a position to refuse a project, but just to bracket that within the overall way we obtain work—those opportunities are really a minority. We were actually joking that this could be a very short conversation, because the answer is quite simple: we only pursue or accept projects that are both socially and/or environmentally progressive. With the exception of a handful of three houses that we’ve done, our work has really been for the public and is inherently aligned with our personal values.

Mimi Hoang  05:28

Two houses completed—the third one is on its way. We were laughing about how our career has kind of been in reverse, because we only started doing houses very recently, versus the typical trajectory of starting with houses and then expanding into public and institutional work. So it’s very interesting to us that it has happened that way. Just to answer the question of what we remember saying no to recently—and to add to Eric’s response, which is great, because it’s true that we’re now pursuing a very specific kind of work—I think a lot of things became clearer to us since COVID. It actually started with two project openings right before COVID. One was for the New York State Equal Rights Heritage Center, and the other was for a tower in Hong Kong. The opening of the New York State Equal Rights Heritage Center was incredible—it’s the first building that the town built, the first municipal project in the town.

Bunge  06:59

After, I think, like 50 years—50 years.

Hoang  07:02

Forty years, fifty years, something like that, right? And it really felt like the town showed up because it was so important to them—the whole community, people from all walks of life. It was the most beautifully diverse group of constituents we’ve ever experienced at an opening.

Versus the opening of something that was also super exciting for us—this tower in Hong Kong—but of course, that opening was very, very different, right? The community wasn’t visible to us. It was market-rate housing.

And so, coupled with COVID and the kind of very unglamorous nature of traveling, we decided since then that, you know what, there is so much work here—for the state, for the city, for public agencies, and so on. We’ve been consciously thinking about this model of practice that requires traveling to glamorous other cities, and this kind of expanding of practice outside of your geographic range—and we’ve really been questioning that.

Miljački  08:34

I’ll definitely ask you about locality, because I see it in the work as something that seems to drive it. But I wanted to stay a little bit longer, before the next question, on this notion of pursuit—of work. You’ve been at it for a while. Did it— you know— when did it start working? Because I think this is a particular way of thinking and organizing, and it’s shaped your body of work. So what does it take? When did you start feeling like it’s working?

Bunge  09:10

No, I mean, it’s funny—maybe we still feel young because it’s still so difficult. Of course, our success rate in terms of winning these RFPs has greatly improved. We put so much work into each pursuit that it can only be worth it if we win, say, one out of every four or so. Otherwise, it’s just not sustainable. So we focus a lot on how to engage that conversation and how to position ourselves to win. That has a little bit to do with our growing portfolio—we’re now in a better position to win commissions that we already have experience in. So it’s a kind of self-perpetuating situation, if you will. When did it start to work? I think it started to click a little bit when we began making choices—you know, what Mimi was saying before, about staying a bit more local. It has to do with a number of things. One, we want to understand for whom we’re designing. It’s difficult to design if you’re, in a sense, exporting architecture; we’ve always been a bit suspicious of that. Two, we want to stay on top of construction and solve problems. Our experience in Hong Kong was not great, because many changes were made without our knowledge or participation. And three, we want to stay in touch with those communities after we’ve intervened. Whenever I go back to Auburn to visit the New York State Equal Rights Heritage Center, our former clients from City Hall across the street will come over and walk through with me—proudly showing something they’ve changed or telling me how things are going. That’s something we can’t do if we’re working all over the world. So I think making those choices has enabled us to better understand who we are—and that’s when things started working a little bit better.

Miljački  11:14

I have a question that you’ve already started responding to, but there may be a couple of dimensions of it that are still worth bringing up. I’ve been lucky to see your portfolio growing up close over the years, and I’ve always found the work consistent in tone—as I said earlier—in its design attention as well as formally. I think it’s useful to connect those dimensions of the work to the question of how you arrive at commissions, or the relationship between the consistency of the work and the nature of the pursuit, as you described it. So, what do you say yes to—within that logic, or within these decisions you’ve been talking about? And I got a sense, reviewing the work for today, that you also sometimes rewrite commissions—that is, you receive a project, but your brief becomes an open-ended kind of conversation. So I thought it would be useful to talk about that as well, in the context of this discussion.

Hoang  12:25

It’s a great question. I think yes—we rewrite every single brief. First of all, we rewrite it through space, but we’re also trying to rewrite it in terms of what the ambition should be, or what the ripple effect can be. And to connect back to your earlier question about when it “worked”—it’s incrementally working, slash not working, right? There was never one defining moment. But part of it “working” also has to do with this idea of rewriting. We’ve figured out how to constantly rewrite and question. Many of our commissions that come to us are as “glamorous” as a public comfort station—public bathrooms. Many of our public pavilions start that way, where we might be invited by a landscape architect to design what’s sometimes called—and this is a term I hate—the “jewel in the park.” That’s not what we do. So we’ll say, yes, we can do the public bathroom—but what about adding a café while you’re there? Or what about an annex to the city library? What about a community room? Or a shaded area for kids to play under? There’s a kind of consistency in how we try to rewrite the brief—in asking, what is the capacity of architecture, in that place, to do much, much more than just, you know, fulfilling bodily functions, which we can also do for you.

Bunge  14:29

We’ve joked—and this is probably a terrible thing to say and put on the record—that when we’re hired for projects, often by the time we leave, we’ve doubled or even tripled the budget, but maybe also tripled the ambition. The Jones Beach Energy and Nature Center is always our favorite example. We keep repeating this story—and we should probably start warning clients! When that project started, it was really just a very modest renovation of an existing bathhouse. I went to meet the manager from New York State Parks, who casually informed us that the local energy provider was planning to replicate that existing 1960s SOM bathhouse—which, by the way, was full of asbestos and sitting at sea level—to house their exhibition about energy. We immediately said, “Why not make one building? Combine resources, combine curatorial aspects, share offices, and overlap functions.” And, well, we’ll see—but it quickly caught fire. The project grew from basically a $5 million renovation into a $30 million new building—net zero. You know the rest of that story. And this happened again with Teatown Lake Reservation, where we, in good faith, tried to accommodate their program and fit three classrooms into the existing building—maybe as a landform next to it, or as an addition. We really tried very hard, but it just wasn’t working. Finally, we proposed a different building on another part of the site that had been used as parking—a standalone education building. We warned them it would cost more; we didn’t know at the time how much. But again, it caught fire. It became a magnet for donations and enthusiasm, and it completely rewrote the program. So I just want to say—it’s not so much a programmatic shift as it is a mission shift that we seem to get involved in. We’re always asking: what is the actual purpose of the institution, and how might that evolve or change?

Miljački  16:32

I mean, it sort of makes me want to know more about these interlocutors on the other end—those who are letting you transform their missions as you go along and produce these things. So if you want to say anything about the type of clients they are—or whether you even think of them as “clients,” or as some other kind of entity in the context of doing these projects.

Hoang  17:01

Yeah, I mean, the clients really range widely. And I think it’s important to say that we are not billionaire whisperers, right? It’s really more about trying to reveal hidden needs that may not have been apparent at the start of a project. But when we start the project, we begin broadly—by thinking about what this neighborhood is, what it was, what it is now, and what it’s becoming. To go back to the example of Hoboken, that neighborhood was a brownfield—it was formerly industrial and had massive stormwater problems. So that’s the functional need of the park. But if you just scrape away at the history a little, you realize that the neighborhood is changing: there are young families moving in, and there’s a growing need for amenities for them – not just play for children, but spaces for parents as well. So we start talking about the holistic needs of that neighborhood, and that’s when the idea of what the pavilion should be begins to expand. That’s one kind of client.

Bunge  19:01

Yeah, also, kind of another answer adding on to what Mimi was saying. I think there are two other sort of dynamics at play. One is disciplinary, in the sense that, as Mimi said, you know, we look at things broadly, and we are not landscape architects, but we think a lot about landscape and sort of expanding the territory of what we do. And so very often we’re working with landscape architects, either under us or above us or in collaboration. And so the conversation is always a lot broader than the building. And so, therefore, this expansion of territory kind of comes with an expansion, maybe of mission or ambition, you could say, sometimes through that kind of overlap. The other aspect is that it’s not as if we come in thinking, how do we make this project even better or bigger or more expensive at all? It’s very organic. The conversation can go in either of two ways. One, it can be an evolution. The A/D/O—that was a private client. The client was actually BMW for that design center. And they didn’t really understand Brooklyn, let alone Greenpoint, at that point just yet. But it was also an experiment for them. They didn’t know what this design center was going to be. In fact, they didn’t even call it a design center at first, but more like, let’s design a space for conversation about design. They had some really good intuitions: let’s have food as part of it, you know, designers in residence, let’s create a space for other people, let’s have a workshop, and so on. But I would say that the identity and mission of the project emerged alongside that design effort because it was a dialogue, which was very different from the case of the Jones Beach Energy and Nature Center or Teatown Lake Reservation, where, actually, I think our role is a bit different in that we are provocateurs somehow—again, not intentionally. We just started to realize, wait a minute, the opportunities are enormous on this site, with these people, with all these caveats that, of course, this may not fit the resources or the ambition, but somehow we ended up leaving the room thinking, oh my God, what have we just done? You know, we just transformed this minor renovation into this incredible project through talking and drawing and designing and thinking. So I think that sort of not-so-much-evolutionary-as-rupture approach that comes from a distrust of program and the idea that there’s a top-down notion that, with words, you can describe how a building is used.

Hoang  21:44

I also want to add that sometimes this shift doesn’t happen at the beginning of a project but in the middle or even toward the end. We work for a lot of city and state agencies, and sometimes there’s a tremendous amount of turnover. Mayors come and go, and when mayors come and go, commissioners and their staff change, and the mission statement for the project you’re working on changes too. I’m thinking about this project we’ve been working on for seven or eight years—it’s ongoing—it’s the Bush Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, for a city agency. When we started working on it, they had identified this exodus happening from the Garment District in Manhattan. We started in 2018, super excited about relocating the Garment District, and then COVID hit. So the project pivoted during construction from garment-specific production to manufacturing in general, because that’s a broader problem: there simply aren’t enough manufacturing spaces in New York. The traditional manufacturing zones, which were once public waterfronts and the city’s edges, have now become highly desirable for housing, the public realm, and civic infrastructure. So we’ve pivoted alongside the project, and now we’re in the middle of renovating our own renovation, bringing in tenants and community programming to the ground floor. We never really know when those shifts will happen. But part of our approach is to develop the bones of a project strongly, yet not too rigidly—not to be too precious about the outcome—so that when things inevitably shift, those bones still hold and can adapt to an evolving mission.

Miljački  24:51

I’m going to shift this a little bit, but, you know, it always loops back to some of the same kinds of questions from different angles. For me, your monograph—or its key terms, buildings and almost buildings—helped, in a way, put words to the nature of consistency that I was already responding to in the work. In the book, you also deliver a kind of gentle manifesto for an openness to impermanence, appropriation, and transformation that you’re pursuing, and that I think you just described, in a certain sense, in the context of this project—as well as for architecture as a form of infrastructure for life. I’d like to quote a sentence from the last paragraph of the book, where you say, “The almost building is an act of resistance to closure and impatience with conventional ideas about what constitutes an architectural project.” And since you use the term resistance, I thought we could talk again about how this position—the kind of building you’re interested in—affects the way you seek out work or situations, or how they find you. Is there a kind of shared understanding of this dimension of the projects you deliver?

Bunge  26:02

That’s a really interesting question. I mean, what we’re trying to say in the book is the resistance to rigid definitions or boundaries—whether to do with agency, like who uses or who misuses (which is one of our favorite terms) our spaces—because we can’t anticipate those things, or who should design a landscape or a building, or what those edges between them are, and so on. So there’s a kind of closure aspect to that resistance, I guess, but it isn’t the same kind of resistance that feels more ideological. Our resistance to working for, say, high-end retail or super fancy homes—part of that is, frankly, happenstance, to be very honest. Our practice just hasn’t gone that way. However, we’ve developed a kind of—not exactly antipathy—but maybe a neutrality toward those things. They just don’t excite us as much. So it’s not so much resistance as it is a kind of exuberance for the other. 

Miljački  27:08

I mean, I understood it the way that you’re sort of qualifying resistance—the idea that your almost building allows for a constant openness of projects. But this is where, for me, it becomes interesting to think about who aligns with that, and how. Because not every client is going to be open to openness in the same way that you’re interested in it. So that’s really the question—do you think this position is something you would ever articulate directly to someone you’re working with, or is it something that simply comes up?

Bunge  27:48

You know, the position about the almost building is something we articulate—not in those exact words—to clients. For instance, we’re working now with Suffolk County in Mastic Beach, Long Island, to design a kind of community platform. It was originally supposed to be a Nature Center, but everyone eventually realized it didn’t need any interior space, and no one could really manage it. The way we’re approaching that design is by building in as much integrated furniture as possible on this big deck—it’s quite large, with a lot of shade structures and things like that—so that many different activities can happen. We talk about how people might use, appropriate, or program those spaces without having a clear mandate, because no one has given us a program, right? So we have to develop scenarios: how can these spaces be used? In those conversations, we do talk about the public and their agency, though we use different words depending on the audience. But the meaning is the same. And we actually find a lot of sympathy for this approach. Everyone on the agency side, of course, wants to be able to transform the buildings themselves. It’s not always about their tenants or users—they would love something not so fixed. So, actually, there’s a lot of sympathy, or empathy, I would say, for an open-ended approach.

Hoang  29:19

Maybe that’s why we are mutually drawn to public clients who understand and want that very open-ended process—because no public client has ever started a project knowing exactly what they want. It doesn’t exist, right? Never have we been given the silver platter of program and mission and agenda. And so I think it takes a certain kind of client who is comfortable with that open-ended process. It’s maybe architecture as process versus architecture as product—or design as product—which is sometimes the case with certain kinds of projects where it’s image, type, and brand that are being sold.

Miljački  30:19

Thank you. I would say that there are a few clear narratives or research loops in your work, and we could relate them to some of the typologies that you do. But also, I think, to internal projects that are, in a way, yours within the firm to pursue. For example, for me, the Ordos House—which I got to know well once upon a time in that 13:100 exhibition—but if you go from that to the Library in Shanghai, which is the link that you yourselves make in lectures, and finally to your CLT House, it feels like you narrate that loop. And I’m really interested in how you think about these feedback loops within your own practice. I think certainly the kind of typological link between the different pavilions and their canopies also suggests that you’re learning from or among those projects as you go. So this is maybe a question about whether your concerns have been transforming over the years—what do you think? How do you think about these feedback loops or forms of research, and how do you conduct conversations about them or work through them in the studio?

Bunge  31:37

I love this question. You know, for us, kind of revisiting ideas, I think, can take one of two forms. On the one hand, there are these open conversations that we feel are just not finished, not exhausted. There are ideas—maybe tics, maybe tendencies—that we gravitate toward. For instance, the disengagement of a roof from an enclosed space: why does a roof need to correlate with an enclosed space? Can it be a very public amenity in its own right? But in the case of Ordos, that was a very strategic—or self-conscious, shall we say—decision: let’s do it again. There was something about Ordos that really intrigued us, even though we never got to build it, and it had many different manifestations. In a way, one could say it started with this idea of a house within a house, because we thought the project was too grand—too large, too much space to heat. It came out of a thermal argument, a kind of modesty: let’s put the house in another house that’s less expensive. But it then became this very interesting spatial question—there are two kinds of modes of living, two kinds of experiences—and that’s what we carried forward, more than the thermal argument, to the Shanghai Library competition and then to the CLT House, which started very deliberately as a remake. We said, “Let’s do Ordos again, but let’s build it ourselves, in our own way—cut it to maybe 20% of the area or something like that.” It was a very different project, but it sustained or maintained that way of living in two different modes that emerged from that thinking: one is about rooms, and one is about not-rooms—living in a fluid space versus living in a room.

Hoang  33:32

I love this question, and how you pose it, and the examples that you’re giving. I think what also ties them together is our obsession with the loose fit—that the ground does not follow the roof, the volumes do not follow the envelope, the use does not follow the program. We’re always trying to find or build that loose fit for ourselves, but also for the end product, right? The looseness of how we suggest use, but don’t complete it. That obsession is just ongoing. And I think it started with the early work—being the fly on the wall of that early work, particularly the installation at P.S.1—and just observing how people interpret the cues we’ve given them, and how they may or may not follow those cues when they don’t, is also really interesting.

Miljački  34:54

I mean, I’m still interested in how you discuss this in the studio—going beyond just the two of you. I can totally imagine the two of you drawing through things like this, but I would also imagine that some of this understanding and curiosity proliferates through the studio. Maybe connected to that, in a lecture, Mimi mentioned making a model of the Shanghai Library after you realized that your winning competition wouldn’t happen. She also mentioned a red book of ideas—I don’t know if this was real or more of a metaphor—but I got curious about both of these forms of recording architectural ideas and keeping them somehow alive in the studio.

Hoang  35:41

They’re a lot—they’re very alive in the studio. Every once in a while, we clean up certain models, and we’re like, “Don’t touch that! I know it’s falling apart, but don’t touch that,” because we have a hard time letting go. But it’s also our way of sharing that conversation—where it’s like, “It’s like this, but not really,” or, “It’s like that, but not really.” We’re not telling anyone to copy it, but rather, “This is where we’re coming from.” So that conversation is something we try to keep alive, but not static. Every once in a while, we’re pinning up the CD drawings, the presentation drawings, and we’re looking at them in conversation about how we evolve—how we draw, or how we represent these ideas. It’s always used as a kind of platform. But then the question to the office is, “And what are we doing that’s different? How are we advancing this?” The Red Book is a real thing. It’s red. It’s red. I was given a blank red sketchbook when I left Steven Holl’s office, and it kind of became the repository of things—particularly dead ideas, or things that are on ice. The things that are “on ice” are like the ones we were sketching, and then they didn’t happen. So we put them there. It became a kind of euphemism: “Put it in the Red Book.” That project died, or that project was canceled? Put it in the Red Book. We lost the competition? Put it in the Red Book. Make a model. Make a model.

Bunge  37:39

I want to talk about the way of drawing or making models after a project. Because, yeah, I was just discussing this in a lecture I gave today—why would we draw a project after it’s finished? Or why would you build a model of the Shanghai Library after it’s done? And I think I realized during the lecture that it’s kind of to make it open-ended again—to turn it into conceptual material, or something that we can understand in a way that allows us to compare it to other things. So, our shorthand for the firm internally is NA—because it takes too long to write nARCHITECTS—we just write NA. And our shorthand for a certain kind of drawing is N drawings. In fact, there are folders on our servers called N drawings—small “n,” capital “Drawings,” or DWGs. And we’re talking about how we’re in the second generation of N drawings right now. We’re testing different ways of representing our work—the first generation, or the self-conscious first generation, having been published in the book. It’s like a book within a book, and there’s a matrix of some of them still on our wall, slowly being taken over by the new version—2.0—of N drawings. And, you know, all of those drawings are produced after the work is done. I had a student ask me about that—when are those drawings produced?—and I started feeling guilty, thinking, well, we don’t really use them to convince clients. But then I thought, maybe we could use that technique to talk to clients. Still, I find myself thinking, no—each drawing has a different audience and a different purpose in the end. For us, it’s about making them all look a certain way so that we can understand them together.

Miljački 39:36

The whole series of pavilions—single-story or one-and-a-half-story institutional buildings, all centers of sorts—seems to benefit from their own embeddedness in their local sites, as well as from your own embeddedness in the same. They often also embody their own didactic functions, a kind of teaching about where they’re from. And these are perhaps two related questions: one about locality—what it means and how you think of it—and the other about giving voice, or giving architecture, to a locality.

Hoang  40:12

I mean, it really— you know, all of those projects emerge from very intense public processes. First of all, the Gansevoort Park Pavilion is where it is because the local Little League and soccer leagues—the kids—showed up with signs saying, “Build our U-12 field,” because there aren’t that many, right? And of course, every project is about the synthesis of all these conflicting, competing demands. The passive nature lovers are always a little bit quieter, while the need for athletics is louder, because they can get the athletic leagues together and be very vocal about their needs. And so this is what we mean when we say it’s both incredibly challenging and incredibly rewarding to be super, super in the weeds with all of these competing demands, people, and constituents. That’s probably why these projects really feel like they emerge from those places. We’re also very in touch with the context—the physical context, the material context, the operational and logistical needs. What they all share is that all of those pavilions are buildings in the round. There’s no back façade; there’s no front and no back. They exist fully in the round and have to front, address, and orient themselves in multiple directions, in very different ways. So yeah, I think it really emerges from the geographic closeness of these projects.

Bunge  42:17

I wanted to also talk about the idea of locality that you’re bringing up. I mean, for non–New York-based architects—or even just non-architects—it’s always surprising to hear that we work in landscapes when we live and work in such a dense environment. All the noise outside is a testament to the density and intensity of where we live. And somehow, we find ourselves with the kinds of problems architects might face working in the countryside, even though our sites are in parks or on the edges or peripheries of the city. It’s given us an opportunity to think a lot about what the idea of site actually means, at least to us. For an architect working in the city, the site is, quite basically, the lot. There aren’t that many decisions to make—it’s made for you by zoning in terms of how you occupy it. But we’ve been thinking for a long time that site is more of a verb—something that entails a kind of interference. And that interference happens at different scales and therefore overlaps across different territories or regions. We might interfere with a legal aspect, or a physical one; we might cast a shadow; maybe there’s infrastructure that stretches beyond the site; or an exhibition that extends from the building out into the landscape, like at Jones Beach. So what is the site, really? We’ve become quite suspicious of the idea of site as a fixed physical boundary. These pavilions, then, end up emerging in our design thinking not as objects, but as a way of interfering with or enhancing something that’s already there—or something our landscape partners are working on. That slippage helps us avoid producing an “object in the field,” if you will. Not that we start out trying to avoid that—it’s more that the questions we ask inevitably lead us to reframe what locality means.

Hoang  44:25

Yeah, we rarely use the word site. We almost always say siting or situating when we need to write about our approach to a so-called site. Because, you know, site is also in people’s memory. The Gansevoort Pavilion, for example, is on the site of the former warehouse building that Gordon Matta-Clark cut into. And being good architecture students, of course, we were obsessed with Gordon Matta-Clark—but it was also a kind of dialogue with that project, and at the time, the upcoming David Hammons’ Day’s End installation, which is the ghost structure of those earlier buildings. So we were thinking about what was coming, and how Hammons was in dialogue with Matta-Clark’s project, and then how we were going to be in dialogue with that project as well. So it’s not just about physical locality, but also about the memory and history embedded in certain sites…

Bunge  45:31

…influenced the design of that roof canopy—the concrete canopy—in the way it’s cut into and reveals things, and how it’s slightly unstable, not quite fitting neatly on top of the volumes.

Hoang  45:41

Yeah, it was already a loose fit, and then we tried to loosen it even more by making these kinds of cuts in dialogue with Matta-Clark. But please don’t tell anyone—no one knows that, I mean…

Miljački  45:59

Speaking about loose fits, I wanted to take seriously the distinctions you make on your website, where, when you describe your work, you produce these categories—buildings and transformations. I’m wondering what this distinction affords you, but also how client types map onto these buildings, transformations, and so on.

Bunge  46:23

You’re so clever—or astute—to focus on this, because it’s really a rejection of typology. I mean, we don’t want to say we design housing, or museums, or whatever. That’s not the point of our work at all. We simply design buildings, and we transform them, and then others…

Hoang  46:40

…transform sites, transform buildings. But Ana, that was like a year of conversation, honestly—so thank you so much for noticing, because we really, really struggled with it. And of course, as Eric said, we went through all the typical options for organizing work—residential, cultural, etc.—but of course, all of our projects are cultural, public, civic, infrastructural… so none of it felt right to us. And we definitely didn’t want to have a category like “installations” or whatever. The and also was exactly that—something much broader—without explicitly calling it an installation, because for us, it’s much, much more than that.

Bunge  47:32

I mean, the worst question for us is somebody holding a drink saying, Oh, do you work on residential commercial? I think I need another drink.

Miljački  47:43

All right, here’s a question for that drink: how were you as your own clients for the CLT House?

Hoang  47:52

I mean, in the beginning, we were excellent clients—excellent—because we said, “We are not spending time on ourselves. We’re going to take Villa, put it on an extreme diet, and we’re going to be done.” But then… we had to choose colors—and then we just spiraled away, you know, spending so much time. But in all honesty, the bones of the project happened very, very quickly, because we had been obsessed with that idea for a long time, as you mentioned before. So that decision came fast. We talked to our friends who build a lot of houses upstate and asked them, “What’s the cheapest way to build up here?” And they said, “Shrink the footprint. Do two stories. Minimize your exterior envelope.” Boom. The math was done, and… 

Bunge  48:49

That’s why our neighbors call it the cube. Yes—but it’s interesting, yeah. I mean, the paradox is that part of the impetus for this project was actually to support the office a little bit. I don’t want to be disingenuous about that, because clearly it’s a great value for us and for our life and our children to have our dream come true and a little place upstate. But really, the first thought was, we’d just lost all these projects during COVID—we needed to create work. Should we buy and flip an apartment and renovate it? What should we do? We were actually thinking, what should we do? And then we thought, well, hey, let’s try to do this big project ourselves. So the paradox is bold—but then we couldn’t afford to put too many people on it, because of course, we still had to generate income and keep people busy on real projects. So it led to a very fast process. I don’t know the exact number of months, but we designed it so quickly we probably skipped the DD phase. We went from SD straight to construction documents, and that was it. Then we started working with the builder who had built our House Between Forest and Field from the outset as a kind of collaborator—without bidding, just open book. And we received a lot of really good advice: “You should use precast foundations, you should do this, you should do that.” And actually, it was a wonderful experience—very, very fast.

Hoang  50:06

Whereas the initial phase went very quickly, the final phase was a bit slow—mainly because of budget limitations, right? But at the same time, I think all of our best projects have gone through a severe VE, and in this case, that VE effort actually supported the idea of the project anyway, because we shrank even more.

Miljački  50:41

This is what I sort of wanted to add as a sub-question here, because we’ve heard how some of the programmatic and architectural ideas transformed or traveled through various other projects before they ended up in the CLT House. But it’s also a demonstration project in material and tectonic terms, and I think that’s useful to acknowledge—it seems like the kind of risk you can take when you’re your own client, right? And so I’m interested in that—the kind of room that this particular position, or these two positions within the project, allowed you to explore something new. Yeah? 

Bunge  51:21

I mean, it ties to our attitude about innovation, which is that it should be limited. Actually, we joke that each project has about 10% innovation or something like that—because we want them to succeed. We always want to be testing new things, innovating, and yet also relying on tried and tested practices, things that people understand how to build, and so on. But in this case, we felt comfortable trying to do our first CLT project for ourselves—and maybe making the mistakes, which we did. We discovered, for instance, that the acoustics of CLT are not great, and so on. It was very interesting, and I’m so glad we weren’t subjecting this to other clients. But now we feel a certain confidence to approach that aspect of a project, right, with others.

Hoang  52:09

Yeah, there’s also a freedom in that—we’re comfortable with things changing and not being perfect, with materials developing a patina, etc., which actually fits very well with a tight budget. So we removed the finishing of the CLT; we removed any protective stain on the wood on the outside. And the result is that the exterior and the interior, depending on their orientation, have aged quite differently. The leeward side has developed a very light gray patina, while the windward side is darker. And on the inside, it’s almost like a clock—the areas exposed to sunlight are a little more yellow than the areas that remain predominantly in shade. Particularly when you work for public agencies, everything has to look the same ten years from now as it did when it was completed—that’s a real concern: durability, lifespan, the finish holding up, all of that. So it was liberating to be able to let go of that aspect of architecture.

Miljački  53:47

In an interview, Mimi, you talk about the tropical climates of Vietnam, and you mention that you’re both interested in thinking about architecture through microclimates—which the Ordos House did, or at least I remember seeing that in it at the time. But I wanted to use this notion to actually talk about the qualities of your buildings and almost buildings, and the extent to which we might find traces of Vietnam or Montreal—or the eyes and bodies trained in those environments—in your projects.

Hoang  54:25

It’s a funny thing to think about—or to try to trace in a literal way—because architecture is super collaborative, and we’re working for pluralistic bodies, right? We’re not, you know, super narrow in terms of who we’re serving. So I would just say that I know where my intentions and motivations come from—they come from environments, spaces, and experiences that are very positive in that way. The way Eric and I have worked for a very long time is to take a walk somewhere and start talking. So we’re often coming up with things outside—in nature, under a tree canopy, or under cloud cover, or whatever, right? So it’s a very… it’s a very kind of intuitive thing. We always hesitate to draw that connection in a literal way; it’s more about our motivation and intentions. And then there are people in the office who feel the same and are drawn to the same kind of intuition.

Bunge  55:41

You know, it’s interesting to posit this sort of influence as tropical and Nordic or whatever, but it’s actually more complex. I feel that my experiences in warm climates have been more profound in a way. I lived and worked in India for two years after graduating from architecture at McGill, working on a temple near Calcutta. And then, you know, my parents are Argentinian, and I’ve lived in places—and I empathize a lot with those climates. I love papaya, you know what I mean? Like, we both share a love of certain fruits because of those influences. So it’s not so much about origin—well, for you, perhaps it is more so—but for me, it’s more about…

Hoang  56:25

Alignment—yes and no. You know, I can tell the story about Vietnam, but I can also tell the story about growing up in America as a war refugee, and the way in which we experienced nature—not hiking, not in pristine nature, but dragging our entire kitchen to public parks and reenacting domestic life in public spaces because we were desperate to connect with other members of the diaspora. No one had houses big enough, and we didn’t find those spaces for us, right? So what I remember is us taking over public spaces with all of our gear and all of our rituals. So it’s about experience and environment—but not a singular one.

Miljački  57:28

That’s perfect, thank you. In that same interview, you say something about pursuing the same goals as when you started—maximizing interaction and inviting appropriation by users and misusers—I’m paraphrasing—but now with more specificity, as well as managing an ever-greater complexity of demands. Are there lessons or skills that you think you’ve developed or honed in that process?

Bunge  58:00

I think it ends up in some very specific design strategies, actually. Like in the Teatown Lake Reservation project we’re designing—we just started construction on what we affectionately call the Leaf, which is an education building that came out of the impossibility of fitting the program into the original boundaries. The main space in that building is really just space. I mean, you enter into it—sure, you could call it a multipurpose space—but it flows through the building. It could be used for this or for that. There’s a little library in one nook where donors—or I should say board members—can host an event, or maybe there could be a teaching activity that spills out onto the deck. But its very lack of definition is precisely what’s empowering about it, because we’re consciously thinking that other people can decide how to use it.

I want to return to the question of program that I mentioned before. Personally, I feel quite aligned with Louis Kahn—not architecturally or aesthetically, necessarily, but in the sense that I think he rejected the idea of program a bit. He took a much longer-term view: architecture isn’t defined by how it could be used, because it could be used differently at a different time. And we’ve always been suspicious of the idea that a client can tell us, “This is the program of a building.” Our first question is always, How do you know? You know, that’s the problem with the notion of programming—it sounds top-down, like, “We are programming this, this is what’s going to happen.” It feels like a mandate. And we always think that’s not how things work. People just come into a space—maybe there’s heat, maybe there’s light, maybe there’s a faucet, maybe there’s internet—and then they’ll sit down and start working.

And I think A/D/O really understood this. Their thinking was, “If we provide free Wi-Fi and let people come in and stay as long as they want, maybe things will happen, conversations will start.” And, in fact, we’ve met so many people who’ve said, “Oh, I loved A/D/O, I used to just sit there all day. I actually started my business there.” People would go over to the restaurant we designed, Norman, pick up a croissant or some lunch, sit at the table, and talk. And then they’d do this and that, and it just became a kind of community center—without an actual governmental body sponsoring it. So I think it was that very lack of definition, that absence of fixed programming, that made it a success.

Hoang  1:00:30

Yeah, I think that our intuition is really largely the same, and that feedback loop—whether it’s from a project or just being involved with different city initiatives—has added more specific anecdotes to what we had generally and intuitively sensed. Like the A/D/O example: there are at least three startups that began in that free Wi-Fi space. I always remember this panel where someone—the Chief of Information Technology for the Mayor’s Office—told a story about a parent coming up to him and thanking him for never turning off the Wi-Fi at the Brooklyn Public Library, because their child would just sit on the steps and finish their homework after library hours. And that is absolutely in line with our general thinking: extend that roof, don’t follow the footprint of the enclosure with the roof. How do you extend urban life, or park life, and let it slip into your project? So these are just more specific anecdotes that help reinforce and support that general intuition we’ve always had.

Bunge  1:02:11

Yeah, maybe there’s one word that I’m using more and more frequently with my students as well, which is generosity. The idea of maximum interaction or appropriation—it’s not just about pushing agency, because we can’t even design all of that—it’s really about extending the reach of architecture to be a catalyst for communities or people who aren’t necessarily your paying clients.

Miljački  1:03:12

Thank you. I have a few more simpler questions. So we counted fifteen people total in the studio—but correct me if that’s wrong. Do you invite your whole team to think collectively about the projects you will and will not pursue? And when it comes to aesthetic, disciplinary, or social concerns, do you discuss those with the larger team? What are the mechanics of aligning—or disagreeing—within the office? 

Hoang  1:03:43

Yes. Often, when we’re not sure about something—because ultimately, we need to make sure there’s no kind of Team A and Team B in the office, where someone is working on something desirable and someone else is stuck on something no one wants—we’ll ask, “What do you guys think about this? Is anyone interested? And why are you interested in it? Do you think this has value? Would you want to work on it? What opportunities do you see?” We try to have monthly pin-ups because, you know, we like to pretend that we’re still in school. And that’s the format for a lot of these conversations, where we’re pinning up progress and soliciting opinions, particularly from people who aren’t working on the project. It might start as a very design-oriented presentation, but it always expands outward—to questions like, “Is this of value? What are we doing here?”

Bunge  1:05:01

But certainly with more—let’s say—leaders in the office, you know, project architects and project managers will sort of vet a potential pursuit. Should we go after this project? Would you want to work on it? Because we’re such a small office, we need to make sure there’s genuine appetite for it.

Miljački  1:05:22

Did you ever regret taking—or not taking—a commission? Or pursuing—or not pursuing—something? 

Bunge  1:05:30

Oh yes, definitely—there’s regret in not pursuing certain things. Sometimes it’s not our choice; we just don’t have the capacity. Sometimes we’re invited to pursue something that sounds wonderful, but sadly, we just can’t—we just don’t have the physical time or space. I think we’re starting to feel that right now. Maybe we’re in a kind of growing-pain period, where there are projects that seem very aligned with our mission, and we just can’t go after them. We simply don’t have the people or the time. I mean, we can hardly find time to talk to each other.

Hoang  1:05:45

I think the intensity of the regret depends on what happens to the project afterward. You know, we’ve been on the Department of Design and Construction—the New York City DDC—Design Excellence Program list for a while, and many of those projects start with something like, “Fix the ADA ramp, fix the ducts, fix the mechanical unit,” blah blah, and then all of a sudden it becomes a new branch library, or an addition to an old one. And we’re like, “Oh my God, why didn’t we go for that? We totally want to do a library!” So it depends—yeah, it’s always the beauty of hindsight, of course.

Miljački  1:06:00

And regrets about taking a commission?

Bunge  1:06:03

I mean, yeah—but maybe more in retrospect, and more to do with how the clients turned out to be evil, not necessarily a type issue.

Miljački  1:06:18

Is there anything else you would like to put on the record?

Bunge  1:06:23

Going back to your first question about what we would refuse, I think we feel so much more confident about that now. I mean, there were so many other pressures when we were young—just making enough money, for instance. I wonder if maybe we were lucky to have had the privilege of maintaining our convictions, because we were, again, fortunate to get certain kinds of work. I always wonder what we would have said no to when we were in our early thirties. But now, I think we feel the confidence to say no a lot more. 

Ana  1:06:39

Well, maybe that’s a good place to end. So, Mimi and Eric, thank you very much for talking to me today—and listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of I Would Prefer Not To, produced by myself and Julian Geltman.