Interventions in the Field of Ideas

The Architectural League’s annual Emerging Voices award spotlights North American individuals and firms with distinct design voices that have the potential to influence the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. This year, the League posed a series of questions to the eight practices that received a 2024 award, prompting each firm or individual to reflect on their working theories and methods, the opportunities and challenges of contemporary practice, and what’s next.

Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood founded AD—WO in New York in 2018. Working at the intersection of art and architecture, the practice is rooted in Black studies, decoloniality, and conceptual art. Below, Admassu and Wood reflect on ongoing research questions and the role of disciplinary critique in their work. 

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What does it mean to be an “emerging” practice or practitioner?
Hopefully, it means we are on the move! We are gaining more resolution and specificity on the issues we care about, the questions and ideas that deserve our time and attention; but most importantly, we are identifying the people we want to work with. The goal is not complete emergence; but instead staying in the space of the verb, an insistence on constant transformation—recalibrating and redirecting every few years based on knowledge gained from our research. 

But we are not alone. We have peers with similar concerns, who are analyzing and articulating the structural forces shaping the built environment today. 

Where do you locate your practice environmentally, socially, and within the design field? 

Our work examines how architecture contributes to environmental degradation, displacement, and dispossession. We all know that the design and construction of buildings requires significant investments of labor and resources. Therefore, being an architect has traditionally meant choosing a relatively conservative position, one that concretizes—instead of disrupting or reimagining—existing sites and institutions of power. But our architectural education has also given us tools to understand how those sites and institutions have been constructed, both spatially and ideologically. This knowledge can be used to account for, redress, and counter their harmful environmental and social impacts.

For example, when we document spaces that are currently being demolished in Addis Ababa, it becomes very difficult to exclusively rely on conventional architectural representation. Our interest in rapid urban transformation—finding ways to draw time, or the temporalities of space making and unmaking—has necessitated a more expansive spatial practice that spans across art and architecture: we make books, images, installations, and tapestries in addition to designing buildings. The aim is to intervene in the field of ideas through collaborations with scholars, artists, and cultural and educational institutions. 

What do you see as the main challenges for your firm’s practice in today’s economic, environmental, and political climate?

We do not want to limit our work to the realm of critique, but starting with a structural critique of the discipline allows us to tap into its imaginative potential. 

The rise of fascism, militarization, surveillance, and policing demonstrates how the ruthlessness of capitalist political economy, coupled with the entrenchment of white supremacy, poses immense challenges. Shifting this trajectory is going to require all sorts of work. We are trying to participate in this protracted struggle by making work that is historically informed, examining the value systems that got us here in the first place: For example, what are the techniques we (architects) take for granted? How can a spatial praxis detect and articulate the violence unleashed by those techniques? 

One of the main challenges facing architecture is its narrowing definition as a mere financial tool. The discipline has been saturated by real estate speculation. This capitulation has kept architects from devising tactics that could unsettle the cyclical processes of demolition and construction. 

Our work grapples with the critical role that architects play in the production of value: the seemingly innocent techniques of measurement and image making that generate empty towers and plots across the planet; building for the sole purpose of parking capital instead of human inhabitation, while a growing number of people remain unhoused. So, the main challenge is finding ways to address these problems without more displacement and dispossession.     

When you are deciding whether to take on a project or collaboration, what questions do you ask yourself? What questions do you ask the client or collaborator?

Do we want to be in conversation with these people for a long period of time? Will this collaboration give us opportunities to explore new ideas, areas of research, and ways of practicing?

How would you define research in your practice?

We develop self-initiated projects, which is to say, questions that do not have a clear set of deliverables. Then, when we receive commissions or invitations to contribute to exhibitions and publications, we use those platforms to further develop our research through writing, image making, installations etc. Recent projects, like the Two Markets exhibition in Providence, Immeasurability in New York, Ghebbi in Venice, Groundwork in Ghent, 100 Links in Chicago, and even commissioned design projects like Bole Rwanda, Sightlines, and Light Industry are all extensions of ongoing research projects.

Do you teach? What is the interplay between your teaching and practice?

Well, one of us (Emanuel) teaches. Teaching offers yet another environment to explore the questions we mentioned above. There are some discoveries made in practice that inform pedagogical experiments and vice versa. But the aim is to maintain a porous but clear boundary between teaching and practice.

Do you prefer to work in a certain scale or typology, or do your projects range in scope? Is there a project type that you would like to design for but have not yet?

We have worked on projects ranging from furniture design to urban design. Our preference is mostly driven by capacity. We are a small firm and we would like to keep the office relatively small, which usually means there is a limit on the number and scale of projects we are able to take on.

How did you meet your partner? How did you decide to practice together

We met in graduate school at Columbia University GSAPP, but we didn’t decide to practice together until three years after graduation. It took some testing and negotiation!

Are there references, of any sort, that you find yourself drawing on again and again?

We both love Chris Ofili’s Blue Devils (2014), which we saw together at the New Museum in 2014. It is one of the key references for our practice.

What’s next?

We are participating in an upcoming exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University called Dear Mazie opening in September focusing on the life and work of trailblazing architect Amaza Lee Meredith. We are also working on a house for a photographer in Njeru, Uganda and trying to finish Bole Rwanda, an apartment building in Addis Ababa. These are some of the main projects in the office at the moment, but of course there are a few other things percolating.

What did you last draw?

A long curtain for Dear Mazie.

When do you consider a project complete?

Never. Ha!