Leong Leong

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

In 2009, brothers Dominic and Chris Leong founded Leong Leong in New York City. They recently described their firm as both an architecture studio and a design consultancy. Their work moves seamlessly across scales and clients—from urban campuses, institutional buildings, and housing to retail interiors, exhibitions, and furniture—and spans every phase from development to architectural articulation and strategic thinking. They have been described by others as working in the sweet spot between experimentation and commercial contracts. In the decade and a half since starting their studio, Leong Leong’s work has been published widely and recognized with awards from The Architectural League of New York, the American Institute of Architects, Architectural Record, Dezeen, and The Architect’s Newspaper. They have exhibited internationally at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Museum of Modern Art, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Cooper Hewitt’s Smithsonian Design Triennial.

Dominic Leong has held invited faculty positions at Columbia University, The Cooper Union, and MIT, and most recently he held the Louis Kahn Visiting Assistant Professorship of Architectural Design at the Yale School of Architecture. In 2014, Leong Leong and Ana Miljacki collaborated on the U.S. Pavilion for the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale and on the OfficeUS project. Since then, they have completed the Anita May Rosenstein LGBT Center in Los Angeles, several exquisite Phillip Lim stores, and many other residential and commercial projects.

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  00:23
Hello, and thank you for tuning in. I’m Ana Miljački, 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 Dominic Leong of Leong Leong. Thank you for joining me, Dominic.

Dominic Leong  01:33
Thank you for having me.

Miljački  01:35
Dominic and his brother Chris founded Leong Leong in 2009 in New York. They have recently described their firm as an architecture studio and a design consultancy, with their work traversing scales and clients seamlessly—from urban campuses, institutional buildings, and housing to retail interiors, exhibitions, and furniture—as well as from development through architectural articulation to strategic thinking. They have been described by others as working in the sweet spot between experimentation and commercial contracts. A decade and a half since they started their studio, Leong Leong’s work has been published widely and recognized with awards from the Architectural League of New York, the American Institute of Architects, Architectural Record, Dezeen, and The Architect’s Newspaper. They have exhibited internationally at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Museum of Modern Art, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Cooper Hewitt’s Smithsonian Design Triennial.

Dominic and Chris took different academic and professional paths before starting their joint firm. Dominic has held invited faculty positions at Columbia University, the Cooper Union, and MIT, and most recently he held the Louis Kahn Visiting Assistant Professorship of Architectural Design at the Yale School of Architecture. In 2014, we collaborated on the U.S. Pavilion for the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale and on the OfficeUS project—or Office US, as our friend Eva²A reference to Eva Franch, an architect, curator, educator and lecturer of experimental forms of art and architectural practice. Franch teaches at the Cooper Union. would insist. Since then, they have completed the Anita May Rosenstein LGBT Center in Los Angeles, several exquisite Phillip Lim stores, and many other residential and commercial projects.

So, as you know, Dominic, we have been starting these conversations by talking about the most memorable decision not to engage, or to drop a commission. And if you have not done that yet, can you imagine doing it—and on what grounds?

Leong  03:48
Thanks for the introduction, Ana. Yeah, it’s great to be back in conversation. I think this is always an interesting question to ask. The one that comes to mind as the most easily refusable project was a police campus. We had already been working with a particular client—I’ll leave the location unknown—but it was outside of the United States. We were working with the client on another civic project, and the opportunity came up to develop a master plan for a police campus outside of the city. I refused it on the spot and said, “We’re not interested in that. We’re going to focus on the cultural and civic project we’re already engaged with.” So that was a pretty easy one.

Miljački  04:59
Mm. Yeah, did it have repercussions?

Leong  05:03
No, I think it actually had no repercussions. In many ways, it was so outside of our interests that it was just a categorical no, without any ambiguity. And I think that clarity was received well by the client. So, in many ways, it was empowering to be in that situation, to have a certain clarity about what we would do and what we wouldn’t do, and to have the client respond with understanding.

Miljački  05:42
If you have more difficult ones, we would be happy to hear about those No’s as well. But I can also ask you this in positive terms. I would describe your work as involving striking, simple geometries and clarity or legibility of organization, delivered in tandem with complex material effects. In other words, I think it’s very consistent. So maybe the converse question is: how have you managed to cultivate this particular body of work? What do you say yes to? And can you help us connect this aesthetic dimension of the work, in its various forms, to the way you think about commissions or clients?

Leong  06:27
It’s interesting to be in practice for over a decade now and look back to see the common threads and consistencies, which at the time were, in many ways, more intuitive. I’ve always thought about practice not as a linear trajectory—from having a disciplinary project or theory of architecture and then trying to enact that in the context of practice, the marketplace, or the world at large—but rather as a feedback loop. The discipline is only as valuable, at least in my view, as it informs issues related to practice and how we engage the world.

We’ve had a very strong set of formal and aesthetic compulsions—that’s a whole other topic of conversation. Early projects were really about exploring this intersection of architecture as an aesthetic practice and, in many ways, as a social practice, even though I don’t think we had named it that at the time. We were always compelled by how architecture brings people together in various ways, or how it allows us to make sense of the world individually, but also—maybe more importantly—collectively. That’s how I understand aesthetics as being social and even political in some regards.

From the very beginning, the practice was rooted in building, and that was always a priority. Whether through commissions we had in fashion retail or through self-initiated installation projects—which eventually led to collaborations with you and Eva through Storefront and OfficeUS at the Venice Biennale—we were always trying to use this language to enact some form of social context that may or may not have existed before. Even in the case of these retail projects, we were always, in a way, trying to engineer some kind of social experiment.

Miljački  09:21
We’ll get to the fine grain of what you’re after a little bit later. But I’m wondering if there’s a way you can describe how you think about what you say yes to. There are these, as you call them—I think you called them compulsions—which I liked, that play out in the work. But somehow there is always a commission, a client, or someone on the other end who is seeking you out to do that, or whom you have sought out to do that. So, it’s interesting to think, at least for me, how consistent the work is in one sense, and yet how diverse it is in another.

Leong  10:07
Yeah, I feel like we’ve said yes to a lot of things overall. You say yes more than no, I think. And that’s really a matter of running a business, to be honest. There’s definitely what you see—the curated set of projects—but there are also other projects that didn’t make that curation.

Miljački  10:41
That feed the office.

Leong  10:43
This is, I think, a general condition of many people’s practices. What we say yes to has to have some alignment—whether aesthetic, programmatic, or cultural. We’re always looking for points of connection with our clients, and that can take many different forms.

In different projects, we’ve found those connections. For example, with the Los Angeles LGBT Center campus, the connection wasn’t really about our aesthetic or formal language at the time—we had never built anything that large or at that scale. The connection was more about a shared ethos around the mission of the organization. In many ways, it was an opportunity for that organization to use architecture as an extension of their mission: to take the legacy of social activism within the LGBT and queer community in Los Angeles and give it a civic presence at that scale. Previously, for the most part, architecture in that context had meant appropriating or co-opting existing buildings and typologies.

So that particular “yes” was really about belief in their mission, and the responsibility and opportunity to think about how architecture can give voice and civic presence to a community like the LGBT community. The language we explored it through was one we had been developing at smaller scales and in different formats and technologies for a long time. But they didn’t come to us because they resonated with our formal language—it was more about belief, and also about a generational shift they were interested in.

Miljački  13:08
So, on your website, you list your clients, and there’s no particular category or way of discerning between them. But I’m wondering if you would say that there are different ways you collaborate with clients or with these interlocutors.

Leong  13:27
I like to say “partners” more than “clients,” and I think that sets a certain intentionality around thinking of clients as collaborators. What we know—and what many of us know—is that amazing work comes from amazing collaborators. Connecting back to your other question about what to say yes to, a lot of it is about looking for partners and collaborators, not so much clients.

That means there’s an exchange happening—an exchange of knowledge, an exchange of ideas, an enrichment. The process where you start is not where you end. It’s really about going on a journey with a group of people you want to spend a lot of time with, exploring possibilities that nobody yet knows the outcomes of. That’s always the best-case scenario, and that’s what we try to design processes for: to enable that.

Over time, one thing that has really become a priority is designing processes that extend beyond a contract—processes that enable more voices to come to the table earlier on. Those voices may be different stakeholder groups or different forms of expertise. What we’re really focused on now is how to design and resource processes with collaborators that embrace more emergent, complex situations. There are best practices for certain things, but that’s not really our interest. It’s more about emergent processes.

Miljački  15:45
I wanted to move on, but I actually like where this ended. So maybe—can you give us an example from your work where you’ve designed the process for collaborating?

Leong  16:01
I think the project we just completed in Hawaii with After Oceanic was one where there was no template for the process. That project, commissioned by the Cooper Hewitt for the Design Triennial this year, actually emerged out of a teaching collaboration with Sean Connelly. It became, in many ways, a very personal journey—me reconnecting with my own ancestral lineage and culture in Hawaii. Ultimately, that was its own process: a personal process woven into an academic one and then into a professional one, which is quite complex for a lot of obvious reasons.

There was no template for that. It started as a conversation between two people and expanded into a very emergent collaboration that ended up involving—if you count everyone—probably 30 to 50 different types of collaborators, from Native Hawaiian culture bearers to educators, traditional hale builders, students who helped construct the projects, and friends and family who supported in different ways.

In many ways, it captured what I think is necessary: to understand architecture not necessarily through authorship, but through stewardship. This is especially important when coming through a cultural lens that frames architecture as a tool for cultural recovery and cultural sovereignty. There’s no real template for that—especially in Hawaii, where the profession of architecture has been more aligned with military infrastructure and commercial development, both of which run counter to the values of Native Hawaiian stewardship of the land.

So, there’s still a lot of work to be done in thinking about how architecture and design processes can steward cultural knowledge and create reciprocal relationships with land, place, and culture. From a professional point of view, there are very few examples of that.

Miljački  19:02
We’ve arrived quickly at the project that I think is symbolic of a transformation—maybe in the tone and direction of your practice, at least from what I’m gathering from your recent talks and work. I want to acknowledge that it’s an evolving practice, and I may have a few more questions about Hawaii. But maybe a simple question is: how has your way of thinking about commissions changed over the last decade and a half? Has it?

Leong  19:42
My focus now is really on finding as much alignment as possible with our collaborators and partners. That might seem obvious, but in many ways it’s been described to me—by a mentor of ours—that a lot of practice is about “staying in the gym”: doing the work, building your skills, building your expertise, building your capacity, and building your understanding of practice. That’s really important. Certain opportunities, either by design or by chance, show up, and you just have to be ready for them.

In many ways, I think the first ten years of our practice were about being in the gym. There were amazing projects that came out of that, but I also feel like we’re just starting. It’s taken ten years of being in the gym to gain clarity about how to leverage our interests and focus. Honestly, I think it takes at least ten years to build enough self-awareness to recognize: okay, this is a valuable point of view that we have. Earlier on, there was a lot more looking around at other references and practices. Now, I think our voice comes from that self-awareness. Ultimately, that’s where we’re at—a transition that feels like a confluence of a lot of reflection.

Miljački  21:56
This might be a good moment to return to your own description of practice as a form of a feedback loop. About five years ago, in your MIT lecture, you showed a diagram that linked context, discipline, and practice. It implied both circularity—which is how you drew it at the time—but also advancement, feedback loops of research, learning, and responding. So I’d like to ask: what are the key topics you’ve been working through in this feedback loop over the past ten-plus years?

Leong  22:43
I think the key topics are architecture as aesthetic, social, and ecological practice, and the realignment of architecture along those lines and with that understanding. Historically, there have been different moments and practices that aligned those more or less. I think it’s the mandate of our generation to do that. Many people understand this now, but there was a time when you were either an aesthetic practice or a social practice, and they were treated as diametrically opposed. I’m heartened to see that this false binary is no longer of interest to many people.

The ultimate long-term interest is to do the hard work of reintegrating architecture as a truly multifaceted, interdisciplinary practice. That’s the big picture. Along the way, we’ve been more or less focused on how to enact different parts of that triad in different situations. In fashion retail, for example, much of the work was about exploring the aesthetics of architecture. A project like the Anita May Rosenstein Campus really demonstrates a connection between the aesthetic and the social in a concrete way. And the work in Hawaii is probably our most advanced integration of all three—through the lens of a Native Hawaiian worldview.

These days, I’m most interested in something more philosophical: challenging the ontological foundation of architecture and its Western legacy. That has to do with our existential outlook on the limits of our planetary boundaries. What got us to this point, I don’t think, will be what ensures survival for ourselves and the multispecies we are responsible for. That’s an ontological question.

Miljački 25:31
Maybe it’s too early to ask this follow up question to that, but do you think that the Hawaii work will impact your work elsewhere?

Leong  25:42
I think now it’s really a question of what’s most radical in practice. At one moment, I thought the most radical thing was to be a place-based practice. Having practiced globally, and having come out of the era of the starchitect, I think now the most radical thing is simply to be place-based. To me, that’s the way to do the most meaningful work: to really understand place, culture, material systems, and labor systems that come out of a particular place or region. I think that’s the future, even if we’re not there yet.

In some ways, you could say we’ve been here before—like in the late ’60s and ’70s with bioregionalism. But the existential realities now are even more acute, clear, and concrete. It’s going to be unavoidable that we become place-based and bioregional, whether we do it intentionally or not.

That thinking shapes my lens on regenerative design, which is such a prominent topic today. My perspective comes through my connection to Hawaiian culture and an ontology that already assumes a reciprocal relationship with nature, built on interconnectivity and interdependence. In Hawaiian culture, the word for land literally means “that which feeds.” So, the ontology already embodies a system of interdependence and care between humans and nonhumans—it’s not even a question.

When I think about how our practice is situated in New York, it sits between a legacy of Western science—which now frames itself through the discourse of regenerative design—and the indigenous knowledge that underlies much of that thinking. Too often, regenerative design is just a reappropriation of indigenous knowledge with new Western terminology. And some folks within that movement acknowledge that properly, but very rarely. I think the real challenge is translating it into improving the material conditions of Indigenous people, whose knowledge guides much of that work. There’s a lot to do in bridging the gap between how we talk about regeneration and how we actually improve the material conditions of communities that have held this wisdom while being dispossessed of it—and of many material resources.

Miljački  28:55
I’m excited to think about how this way of approaching practice—a place-based practice—might intersect with saying yes or no to the opportunities that come your way. It may not be entirely clear yet, but it seems like a set of concerns or criteria that could influence how one thinks about commissions, clients, work, and alignment.

Leong  29:28
Totally. I’ve also been thinking a lot about how to exist in contradiction—being caught in the web of entanglements that exist for all of us, despite our best intentions and idealism. Architecture, in many ways, is a practice and a business that sits right at the paradox of idealism and capitalism. I don’t think I’m alone in that.

So what does it mean to work imperfectly? To take accountability for that imperfection, and to be realistic about what is and isn’t possible? I think there needs to be a lot of honesty about that.

Miljački  30:43
I’m curious—how often do you take stock of where you’ve been and where you’re going as a practice?

Leong  30:52
All the time. That’s the circle—that’s why it’s a circle. It’s this constant, never-ending questioning: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Are we doing the right thing? That’s both the beauty and the exhausting part of practice. It’s never totally clear where we’re headed or why we’re doing what we’re doing, and I think that’s really exciting.

That’s why I appreciate conversations like this—because they prompt moments to reflect. Every time a lecture is given, there’s a lot of reflection, too. So that’s been a kind of constant dialogue within our practice. Over time, of course, hindsight is 2020. But at the same time, you start to see the circularity—the past and the future are nonlinear. It’s not a straight line; it’s just constant questioning.

Miljački  32:28
I’d like us to talk about two categories of your work—both in terms of the kinds of commissions they are and the kinds of concerns they entail, with some examples. One is housing as a big category, and the other is objects, like the fermentation pots or the textile experiments with Quadrat. These feel like they’re on different ends of a spectrum, but not unrelated—both connected to this question of home and collectivity that you’ve been talking about supporting. So how do these projects come to you? What do you think about when you’re considering them and when you’re working on them?

Leong  33:27
Interesting question, because there’s definitely a through line, and one of those is typology. Both Chris and I have been exploring different ideas of domesticity and living through different scales and types. On the housing side, especially the affordable housing projects and proposals we’ve worked on at the urban scale, Chris has really been leading that within our practice—thinking about housing at the scale of the multifamily or collective typology, and what’s possible within the constraints of U.S. and New York housing, which are highly restrictive. On the other hand, as you pointed out, there’s also our exploration of domestic life and domesticity through the typology of objects—more at the scale of artifacts and furniture. There’s the rocker, the Toolkit for the Newer Age, the fermentation vessels, the Kipuka modular seating tapestry, and the interior system. Those are about constellations of domesticity, ritual, and temporality that don’t necessarily have a container, but still constitute a house—or a home—in the way they enact certain rituals, behaviors, or temporalities. So, I appreciate that you’ve put these two aspects of the practice in conversation with one another. They are connected, but they approach different arrangements of living through different scales and typological concerns.

Miljački  35:54
Do they play out differently in the office or in terms of collaborations?

Leong  35:59
Yes, absolutely. The housing proposals mostly come through RFPs run by the city, HPD, or NYCHA. In the case of the Anita May Rosenstein Campus, there’s a large senior housing and youth housing component, and those projects all work within the constraints of their economics and bureaucracies.

The smaller-scale explorations, on the other hand, were mostly commissioned for exhibitions by different institutions, where we act as our own collaborators and authors. In some ways, they’re more like art projects—more conceptual by nature. I think that actually explains a lot about our process and practice. The collaboration with Chris and our team has been about inhabiting both these very conceptual projects and these very concrete ones, and finding the continuities between them. We didn’t always know why we were doing these seemingly random installations, but we knew they fueled certain explorations in the practice. Ultimately, they informed how we think about housing at large—even if that work remains highly constrained.

Miljački  37:46
Maybe we can shift a little. I had a question about Hawaii and the idea of a literal and conceptual return, but I feel like we’ve already touched on that and begun distilling it in your answers. More recently, you’ve been describing architecture as a relational practice—or maybe you always have, but certainly in your recent lectures that’s what I’ve been gathering.

In your MIT lecture, there was a striking line or two that stayed with me. I’ve been working on topics of authorship and collective authorship in architecture, and you spoke about “professional ego death” and a kind of expansion of practice—an expansion of the definition of services that architects provide, or the modes of engagement they can take on. Do you remember saying something like this? Can we talk about what that actually means or entails—either the expansion or the ego death?

Leong  38:58
I think it’s about connecting the personal to the professional and trying to find a deeper meaning in what it means to be an architect. From a biographical point of view, our dad was an architect, and I grew up around architecture. In some ways, I’ve always tried to escape it. So, while I’m grounded in architectural issues and thinking, I’ve also been drawn to art practice and the overlapping concerns that connect, for instance, how we think about disability justice through art versus through architecture.

What we’ve inherited through the discipline of architecture is, in many ways, what I’m searching for ego death from—to liberate myself from what I’ve inherited. That becomes personal, because at an epistemological level, what I learned through architecture relates only to part of my own epistemology, shaped by European descent. The discipline never spoke to an Indigenous or, more specifically, an Oceanic Native Hawaiian worldview.

It’s taken me twenty years to feel the confidence to jettison much of what was given authority within the discipline and profession, in order to recover a different foundation for how I view what architecture is, what it can do, and what it should do. Out of that ontological shift comes a challenge to the idea of the architect as author. From a Native Hawaiian point of view, it’s about the perpetuation and stewardship of knowledge—something beyond any one person, rooted in responsibility to knowledge and to place.

That perspective complicates what it means to innovate. Innovation in that context is bound to tradition and continuity of knowledge, while still allowing incremental change—but always held accountable to place and community. That is very different from how I was trained as an architect.

Miljački  42:32
I have a follow-up that may be a big one. In your interview for Document Journal, you made a distinction between caring about political and social topics—thinking that architecture has a role in relation to those—and being an “activist architect.” I’d like to enter that space of difference with you.

Leong  42:58
Yeah, I think the experience of the process we went through designing and building the Los Angeles LGBT Center is a good example, because the role I think we played as architects was about a longer journey, a longer process for the LGBTQ community that started through protests and resistance in the late ’60s, through police brutality—all of these conditions that required social innovation. And we were a part of that long journey in the sense that, like I’ve said before, for the most part, design and architecture—or let’s say architecture—was appropriated within that movement: liberation houses, domestic environments, the appropriation of office buildings, other typologies.

And then, all of a sudden, the organization, through the transformation from a grassroots movement to an institution, had the opportunity and the ambition to create a purpose-built campus. So, all of a sudden, the role of the architect comes into the picture, to shape that vision into some kind of architectural intervention. And so, I think it’s very different to play the role of the architect at that moment versus playing the role of an activist within that earlier part of the process.

Miljački  45:07
I read an interview with you and Chris in Pin-Up, where you talked about realizing that the office speaks with three voices: yours, Chris’s, and your team’s. This is a question about the mechanics of the studio. Do you invite your whole team—currently four people, in addition to the two of you—into thinking collectively about which projects to pursue or not pursue?

I’m also wondering how the aesthetic, disciplinary, and social concerns are discussed within that larger team. What are the mechanics of aligning or disagreeing in the context of the office?

Leong  45:56
We’re small, so fortunately it’s not that complicated. But we try to have conversations with our team that can hold all the different contexts and complexities of what it means to practice. There are the intellectual pursuits and interests, the economic realities of running a business, and the moral and ethical questions. There are no best practices, and we don’t have a fixed set of rules that determine a clear go/no-go.

Instead, we try to approach every situation uniquely, to understand its nuances—aside from obvious cases, like a prison or a police station. So, it’s always a conversation, or at least I hope it’s always a conversation.

Miljački  46:58
So is the office, in a way, exposed to the realities of running the practice as you make these kinds of decisions?

Leong  47:06
I think our staff probably knows more than in many other organizations about the realities of practice. They’re not looking at our spreadsheets, of course—that takes its own context to understand—but they are clear on why we make the decisions we make and the pros-and-cons analysis that goes into every project we take on. We have those conversations with them, and we definitely listen. At the same time, it’s not a cooperative model. It’s still traditional in the sense that there is some hierarchy.

Miljački  47:48
Here’s a follow-up: have you at Leong Leong ever regretted taking—or not taking—a commission?

Leong  47:58
Yes.

Miljački  48:02
Oh, how does that story go?

Leong  48:06
There might have been other ways to learn that lesson. And I think there are a lot of diminishing returns on learning versus brain damage or just opportunity cost, and that changes over time. Now that we have a body of work that I think speaks to what the practice is about, it’s a lot easier to let go of things sooner, or even realize—before you even get to that point—that you shouldn’t pursue it. Maybe that’s just wisdom. You’re just more focused.

I think situations where collaborations become disrespectful are the ones where you realize it’s not worth it. You get smarter over time about who you think will be a good collaborator. All these things sound obvious, but I don’t know.

Miljački  49:15
When you take on projects—this is why we’re talking about them, so we can give them some specificity and hope they serve the larger community. How would you describe the conditions in which Leong Leong does its best work? And to tag onto that: are all pursuits equally exciting, or are there ideal ones? Are there ideal circumstances for a project that you look for?

Leong  49:47
Absolutely. I think part of running a practice is trying to create opportunities that align as many dots as possible. There are so many criteria—resources, values, timing, bandwidth, geography, logistics. Of all of these, I think the most important one is values. If there’s alignment there, many of the other things can be worked out, even resources. Of course, having a well-resourced project can seem like the best thing. But when I look back on our work, that’s not always the case if I measure by outcomes or discoveries—criteria that aren’t necessarily economic. That’s always hard to predict, but it’s true. At the same time, sustaining the practice requires acknowledging that this is also a business. What drives us, though, are the collaborations that lead us to places we never knew existed—where something unexpected emerges. And that always comes back to people. For us, clients are equal collaborators in these processes.

Miljački  51:51
Maybe I’ll push you a little on the values you like to align. What would be the top few? I’m asking because I’m realizing we haven’t talked much about material experimentation—which, at least at the beginning of your career, was almost a tagline for Leong Leong. So, what are the top three values you’d like to align?

Leong  52:24
The most important thing is that design and architecture have value as tools to enact whatever agenda or goal the client or partner has—that architecture, and the role of architects, can serve as a resource for world-building, collective world-building, whether at a small or large scale. Not everyone sees or understands that, so it’s always great when there’s openness, or at least the potential to learn and understand it over the course of a project.

I think one of the most fundamental values is collaborating with partners or clients who embrace a learning process—who are willing to embrace uncertainty and the unfolding of the process itself. Because aside from everything else, the ultimate goal is to constantly be learning.

Miljački  53:36
Dominic, 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.

Leong  53:48
Thank you for having me.