LTL Architects

Recorded on February 13, 2026. Read a transcript at the bottom of the page.

David J. Lewis, Paul Lewis, and Marc Tsurumaki founded Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, or LTL Architects, in 1997 in New York City. Over nearly three decades of practice, their work has grown from materially inventive New York interiors informed by speculative research to ground-up institutional buildings and renovations. In recent years, they have focused their practice on the role of embodied carbon in building and the architectural potentials of plant- and earth-based materials. Their publications, from the Pamphlet Architecture 21: Situation Normal in 1998 and Opportunistic Architecture in 2008, to the more recent Manual of Section, Manual of Physical Distancing, and Manual of Biogenic House Sections, have circulated widely through architecture schools and the field at large.

David J. Lewis teaches at Parsons’ School of Constructed Environments. Paul Lewis is the associate dean of Princeton School of Architecture and served as the President of The Architectural League of New York from 2018 to 2022. Marc Tsurumaki directs the MArch program at Columbia University GSAPP and was President of the Board of Directors of Storefront for Art and Architecture from 2019 to 2025. 

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 00:21
Hello, and thank you for tuning in. I am Ana Miljački, Professor of Architecture at MIT and director of the Critical Broadcasting Lab. And 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 to not 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 the principals of LTL. Paul Lewis –

Paul Lewis 01:28
It’s a pleasure to be here.

Miljački 01:30
Marc Tsurumaki –

Marc Tsurumaki 01:32
Thanks for having us.

Miljački 01:34
and David Lewis –

David Lewis 01:36
Thank you for having all three of us.

Miljački 01:39
Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, and David J. Lewis founded Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, or LTL Architects, in 1997 in New York. Over nearly three decades of practice, their work has ranged and grown from materially inventive, exciting New York interiors, through speculative territorial and material research, to ground-up institutional public buildings and renovations. They now describe what they do as the pursuit of architecture at the intersection of spatial invention, material innovation, and collective experience.
And all along, they have been generously inviting the rest of the discipline to engage in and produce discourse about important topics. They have focused their practice in recent years on the role of embodied carbon and the architectural potentials of plant- and earth-based materials. And through it all, their publications—from the Pamphlet Architecture “Situation Normal” in 1998, through Opportunistic Architecture in 2008, to more recent manuals: Manual of Section, Manual of Physical Distancing, and Manual of Biogenic House Sections—have been circulating widely and consequentially through architecture schools and the profession.

All three principals of LTL—Paul, Marc, and David—teach at Princeton, Columbia, and Parsons, respectively. Paul is also the Associate Dean at Princeton, Marc directs the M.Arch program at GSAPP, and David was the Dean of the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons. They have been active participants in the stewarding of New York City’s architectural scene, with Paul as the President of The Architectural League of New York from 2018 to 2022, and Marc as President of the Board of Directors of Storefront for Art and Architecture from 2019 to 2025.

LTL’s collective CV is filled with awards and projects, and I can only mention a few here. LTL Architects were the recipients of the Emerging Voices award from The Architectural League of New York in 2002. They are the 2019 New York State AIA Firm of the Year, the 2023 Best of Practice from The Architect’s Newspaper, recipients of a National Design Award, and they have been inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame. They have received numerous AIA awards and six “Best of Year” awards from Interior Design magazine. Their work was included in the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and SFMOMA.

Their recent and notable projects include a 264-bed residence at Fifth & Clyde for Carnegie Mellon University; Poster House in New York City; the Helen R. Walton Children’s Enrichment Center and Early Childhood Education Center in Bentonville, Arkansas; the renovation of The ContemporAry Austin – Jones Center; the renovation of the Joseph D. Jamail Lecture Hall at Columbia University; and the renovation of the Students’ Building at Vassar College, among others—many of which are on university campuses across the country. LTL literally just won the Resilient Campus international competition sponsored by the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning.

I also know that a number of biogenic house prototypes are currently underway, and I hope that we can talk about them today. But, as usual, we will be starting with the work that is not happening or has not happened—or with the memorable decision not to engage or to drop a commission. In preparation for this conversation, I was reminded that Paul and I talked about some of these topics already in our live session with Mario Gooden a couple of years ago. We can revisit some of those answers now with all the LTL participants present. I can remind you, Paul, what you said if you want, but it was basically that your decision not to engage a loft renovation led to many other consequential decisions for the practice.
But let’s start with this: maybe you have different memorable “no’s” to share with us.

P. Lewis 05:45
Thank you, Ana. It’s a real pleasure to be on this podcast, which has acquired a super interesting history. To go back to that memorable refusal, it still looms large in the sense that it was one of our first requests—potentially large in terms of budget—from a client to renovate a loft. It was carte blanche; we could do whatever we wanted. It was an opportunity to really have almost an unlimited budget.
The downside to this was that we realized pretty quickly that the client was very dismissive of his assistant, and ultimately, despite the benefits of getting an elaborate project potentially realized, this was not something we felt our time was going to be contributing to in a way that was genuinely beneficial. It was essentially helping this person’s narcissism and was not a contribution to the collective.

So, this refusal, if you will, really lined up with a larger argument that we had put in motion at the very start of the practice: to try to focus on things that had a collective benefit. One of the great pleasures of architecture is that it can operate within, and have a huge impact on, the social realm.
We made a decision fairly early on to focus on projects that had some aspect of a public presence. Restaurants, for example, became a site of invention. Rather than apartments—we purposely turned down apartments—that was by far the most memorable one because it came with the biggest budget and, in a sense, the greatest freedom, which is usually a seductive thing for architects to engage in. But it lined up with a larger desire to simultaneously work within the “collective arena,” to work on ideas that would be materialized and legible, and ultimately, create something that people could visit and go to.
That was a defining moment within the practice, and it set us in motion to a point where, ironically enough, we’re now working on residential projects—but that’s another story, so we’ll get into that in time. Our refusal was not absolute; it was conditioned by the circumstances of what we were working within.

Miljački 08:26
But maybe this is a little sub-question: Did you regret that decision? Not just that particular decision, but this definition of the practice away from residential work? [Observation:] Everyone is nodding “no” or shaking their heads at the idea of regrets.I had also asked you in that previous conversation about the idea of “opportunistic architecture” and how that position led you to think about architecture for a while, at least. But I also have a sense that—with your major shift of focus toward what Marc called in a recent lecture the “existential urgencies of the climate crisis and its related crises”—this question of refusal, or perhaps how you describe your path, is bigger than any specific commission. It seems to me it would be useful to start talking about that.

Tsurumaki 09:26
Yeah, I could pick up on that. I think what you’re saying is exactly right. I mean, there’s the early history of the firm where we were trying to map out a trajectory of work and think about how the agency of architecture can have the greatest impact. In the current situation and the most recent work—work that’s really grown out of the tendency in our office to operate not only through commissioned projects but through self-generated, speculative design and publication—this notion of thinking through materiality came into contact with the realities of the environmental crisis.

That obsession with materiality was present even in some of our earliest built projects, but it inevitably met the realization—which is now widely known and commonly accepted—that buildings have an enormous impact on, and a contributing role in, the urgent and catastrophic climate change we’re seeing all around us on a daily basis.

These two ideas came together with the recognition of the role of embodied carbon. Although architects have made a lot of progress and there’s been a significant focus on operational carbon, the questions of carbon associated with extraction, processing, and the initial construction of buildings have not been as much of a focus until more recently.

What we’ve become very interested in—in our own work, research, and teaching—is a shift away from the legacies of Modernism and the reliance on concrete, steel, and glass. We are moving away from heavily processed industrial materials that are both carbon-intensive and have historically had negative impacts, not only on the environment but on communities, human health, and non-human vitality.

Our current work is really committed to looking increasingly at plant- and earth-based materials—biogenic materials—which are carbon-sequestering. Plants, obviously, sequester carbon within their very cell structure, but they can also be linked to regenerative cycles. This shifts the relationship of the building to the larger ecological context and, in a way, shifts the role of the architect from essentially a user of commodity products back to some of our early fascination with inventing new ways of operating with materials.

Miljački 12:33
I’ll definitely go back to that at the very end. But you know, it has always been the three of you practicing together, and I often find it astonishing to hear how aligned you are when I listen to you talking about your projects separately.

I’m interested in how you arrive at that alignment. Perhaps that’s too personal, but it seems important to hear how you collectively align behind a set of positions, and then maybe to help us draw links between those positions on architecture and the way they have impacted your commissions and projects. How do you navigate the landscape of your interests versus your commissions?

D. Lewis 13:25
I think one of the ways to answer that—and this may tie back to the initial framing of the question around “opportunistic architecture”—is that we began the practice with a shared interest in the constraints of the world we exist in: where does agency lie, and how can you look at the work of both the architect and architecture itself as having a transformative capacity within public space and civic discourse?

That is a shared, grounded principle that has informed not only the decisions we make about which commissions to take (and which ones we “would prefer not to”), but also the design practice itself. It is not about one person’s design aesthetics, but rather beginning with a research agenda into the particulars of any given project, or the broader project of architecture itself. We inform that through a careful understanding of the pragmatics of the world—its facts, its figures, and its science—and then asking: where is there a question? Where is there opportunity? And where is there a necessity for change?

That applies to everything from a smaller project, where you’re looking at site constraints and budget, to much broader issues regarding the role architecture should play today. I think that is a shared understanding the three of us have, which also ties to the way in which we teach and think of the role of the architect—not simply as being demonstrated through the production of work, but also through the creation, amplification, and cultivation of discourse.

That leads to why we publish and the kinds of publications we produce. What is the argument? What is the underlying premise that isn’t simply about the demonstration of self and ego, but the construction of a much broader framework for answering the question: what do we want to do with the lives we are given? How can we make the greatest change, and on what basis?

Miljački 15:26
But is this understanding tacit, or do you have to discuss it? I’m interested in the format—how do you arrive at these decisions?

P. Lewis 15:37
We have a certain advantage in that, you know, two of us are twins—so there’s that. But no, it has to be argued for. I mean, I do think that we talk a lot amongst the three of us, but it’s often grounded in—as David was saying—pragmatics and a kind of rational assessment of: What are the paths forward? What are the constraints? How do we actually operate? What are the means to develop a project? What are we going to go after, and what are we not going to go after? How are we going to define the practice?
And it’s evolving, right? I think the decision—whatever it was, four or five years ago—to really shift the practice toward biogenic materials was a conscious decision based on looking at the evidence in the world and what its status is. It was about how architects can really have agency within the climate crisis and the converging crises that Marc had identified. How do we have an effect that has value? So, it wasn’t determined twenty-five years ago and then just plowed forward; it really has to evolve through an assessment of the world we exist in.

Miljački 16:53
Let’s talk about the different components of your practice. You’ve listed them, and I’ve listed them already, but I would say speculative work, exhibitions, manuals, and then commissions—they have been different forms of engagement. Maybe they speak to what you were describing, David, as finding the right mode of asserting agency on a topic-by-topic basis.

But how do these connect? I’m interested in trying to draw out the connections, or the “feedback loops,” between research, representational work, dissemination, and architectural commissions. Maybe we can add speculative competitions to that as well; it probably intersects with a couple of those. Can you talk about those feedback loops within the work, or even among the three of you in relation to that work?

Tsurumaki 17:53
I think that’s exactly the way we would talk about it. We tend to think of them as feedback loops—that those different trajectories or aspects of our practice are not mutually distinct; they’re really reciprocal. They end up informing and inflecting one another on an ongoing basis.

Research that often takes form in publications might emerge from curiosities that arise while engaging with a certain commission. Then, the research from the book might end up inflecting the studios we teach or the courses we engage in, and that research eventually folds back into how we approach projects.

The recent work on biogenic materials is a perfect example. It emerged out of the follow-up to the initial Manual of Section publication. In the context of researching the next version of that, it became quickly apparent that this was where we needed to be focusing our efforts and our attention. That has obviously transformed the way we teach, but it has also transformed the nature, content, location, and typology of the projects we engage with, shifting the practice at a larger scale.

So, absolutely, these things are in a continual cycle where one informs the other and starts to push the firm in different directions. We’ve been teaching as long as we’ve been practicing together, and we’ve always seen those aspects as mutually informative and symbiotic.

P. Lewis 19:58
Yeah, let me be super precise about that. In our self-generated projects going back twenty-five years, we have relied on the section perspective as a way to make [the building] legible in terms of its assembly, without privileging the image of the building from the outside. The section perspective is a way of doing that.

That led to teaching and questions of: How do we teach the argument about section? There was a criticism that there wasn’t much research or work done on what makes a “good” section, and yet it’s dominant within academia. So, that led to the development of the Manual of Section. As an outcome of that, there was a request: “Can you develop another section book that focuses more precisely on tectonics and materials?” These are not always legible in the Manual of Section because some of those projects were too large.

The house became a useful vehicle for this, coinciding with our interest in embodied carbon. We aligned that book with biogenic and geogenic assemblies, looking at sectional experiments within the house typology. We were largely drawing other people’s built houses for that, which, of course, led to us saying, “Well, we would like to design houses that continue this invention.”

So, we did a series of five houses looking at inventions that come from the material itself, which has now led to projects we are currently building using those materials. These things loop in very direct ways, and we actually like the productive oscillation between practice, academia, and research-based production.

Miljački 21:45
Let me give you a sub-question that comes from your responses. We often talk about feedback loops across these different modalities—certainly academia and practice. But in your case, I am—maybe romantically—imagining that when I look at your practice, it seems to have moments where you take time to reflect. That is different than just constantly working on all of these fronts at the same time, right? It’s not just that they “feed” each other, but that somehow you’re able to use the research, the academic work, and the speculative work to reorient the practice in a way that is palpable from the outside.

D. Lewis 22:33
That’s good to hear, because one of the things that comes out of the collaborative process between the three of us is that we seek in each project to raise the question: What’s the opportunity here? What’s our agency? How do we make change, and what kinds of work should we be pursuing to make that happen?

Whether that’s self-generated work, publication, or—and I would say equally—the focus upon representation. The old adage is that architects don’t build buildings; they make drawings. And while we’d like to blur that as well, we’re also particularly interested in the role of representation to communicate ideas and to raise questions. The foregrounding of representation isn’t a byproduct; it’s actually a language—a way of communicating and exploring the very possibilities for architecture and the agency contained within.

Miljački 23:42
Related to that—and given that you just won this Buffalo campus competition—what has been the value of competitions for you, and how do you think about that mode of working?

Tsurumaki 23:58
That’s a good question, especially because the Buffalo competition was an anomaly in our practice. We actually haven’t engaged in many standard or conventional competitions over the years. For me, that’s another “I prefer not to” moment. We realized at a certain point that competitions demanded an enormous investment of time and labor, and frequently they were not structured with any degree of certainty.

Often it feels random; you feel as if you’re putting work into a void. You are also subject to the terms of the competition, which—even when speculative—are frequently not in alignment with what you might be interested in. We made a strategic decision early on that if we were going to invest that kind of research effort, we should simply identify the things most relevant and compelling to us, rather than being subject to those terms.

Furthermore, because competitions tend to be unpaid and somewhat exploitative, they rely on uncompensated labor and set up expectations within the profession that rely upon the sweat of those at the entry level. What was great for us about the Buffalo [Resilient Campus] competition were two things:

One, it was compensated. While one always tends to over-invest when you’re interested in something, the second aspect was that it intersected and overlapped in productive ways with the work we’re already doing. The brief was super clear, intelligently articulated, and very precise about rethinking the campus—not just generally, but specifically in terms of regenerative systems and relationships to larger ecosystemic and regional questions.

We saw a real opportunity to explore things we’ve been looking at in smaller-scale built projects at a larger, more landscape-oriented and eco-regional scale. The alignment between the ethos of the competition and the current focus of our work made it very appealing.

P. Lewis 27:21
It was also specifically requested that we form a collaboration. Being able to work with Nelson Byrd Woltz and Silman (formerly D’Huy Engineering) to form a really interesting dialogue was super appealing. It was a smart competition. Often, you spend time fighting the competition brief—thinking, “Why are we doing this?” or “If we change that, are we going to get disqualified, or is that precisely what’s going to help distinguish us because we’re pushing against the brief?” All of those machinations one goes through when responding to a public competition—this particular one was so intelligently designed, it just made sense to pursue it.

D. Lewis 28:06
But I think what you’re framing is that “competitions” are multiple different ways of engagement. We look at competitions not as one thing we pursue, but as: “What is the intent of the competition?” The open competition that selects ideas, which Marc said often relies upon a huge amount of labor and may not align with the practice, is one we haven’t done.

However, we have taken on invited competitions with a small group of people. We did a competition for a very well-off ski town in the Rocky Mountains, and we won. This would seem great—it’s not compensated that much, but you get the project, so you think you want to take it on.

This sets up the other paradox of competitions: Is the goal to execute the design, and what is the role of the architect afterward? In this case, we found out that our role was—yes, we won the competition—now we have to actually figure out how to fundraise for the very project we just won. That requires free labor to convince other people to essentially underwrite the thing.

You end up in this incredibly complicated relationship: “Wait a second, how much more do I have to invest to realize the project I just won?” We had already invested a huge amount, and that becomes a real challenge for expectations. In that project, at a certain point, we stepped away. We said, “We’d prefer not” to continue working on this without further compensation because the process was not respectful of the value of labor. We are increasingly seeing this in invited competitions—they are used to drive fundraising or decisions in a way that doesn’t put the architect in a position of agency, but can actually be very exploitative.

Miljački 30:17
Thank you. I mean, thank you for hitting the “I would prefer not to” in that answer. Can we talk about hands-on testing and building, but also hand drawing? I know that you explained your drawing techniques in Opportunistic Architecture—which we all welcomed at the time—but as I saw the beautiful drawings of the Resilient Campus, I thought it might be useful to revisit “hands-on” and “hand-drawn” as particular topics in our contemporary representational ecology. In the world we inhabit as architects, we will soon be able to do representation in ways we haven’t been able to do before—we already are—and yet you’re insisting on these modes. I would like to hear what you’re thinking as you do that.

D. Lewis 31:16
Let me try to answer this from the perspective of what we would “prefer not to do.” This goes back to when early forms of digital modeling—form•Z and others—set up a workflow process that could produce an incredible sameness in representation. It missed out on some of the creative aspects of hand drawing while privileging digital practices.

We realized: Can we actually learn from both of these? Can we develop a form of representation that paradoxically uses the speed of hand drawing to do things really quickly against the slowness and precision of the digital—which is actually the opposite of how people tend to think about these mediums? People tend to think about hand drawing as being slow and digital as being fast. It’s actually the exact opposite.

We wanted to be able to produce a method of working that allows us to have agency, as opposed to allowing the programming process or a workflow to dictate an end goal. We preferred not to follow what we were “supposed” to do, but actually tried to find ways to circumvent them. That sets up a kind of creative friction that underlies a practice of creativity and invention.

P. Lewis 32:33
But also, to build on that: it allows us, through the level of precision or elaboration that hand drawing brings, to work across scales. You could take a massing in Rhino and give it a level of detail and articulation that would be almost impossible to model at that level, but one can draw it on a particular perspective.

This goes to a larger argument: we think one of the great pleasures of architecture is the ability to move between different scales—the inventions and transitions that occur between the detail, the assembly, the massing, the site plan, etc. In a strange way, being able to work by hand to elaborate those oscillations—but also, when we build things, to be able to actually get into the physical details—allows us to know the important consequences on the overall massing and vice versa. The full spectrum of design invention takes place across those scales, and so the use of the hand allows us a greater level of agency, to be blunt, across all those scales. We are not beholden to the protocols of software or the assumptions of standard construction.

Miljački 33:59
And the “hands-on”—I mean, having seen some images of the production of the biogenic house prototypes, that seems to be demanding in terms of labor and hands-on attention. I detect pure pleasure on your part in this. I’d like to see if those are related—the hand-drawn and the hands-on—and maybe how they relate to the subject of the architect you’d like to put forward.

P. Lewis 34:41
Well, one thing that’s worth clarifying here is that in the case of this recent All-Straw House we’ve been building, it has required multiple hands. It has required an engagement with a team; it really is a group exercise that takes multiple people. On the other hand, when we’re doing the compositional design work, a lot of that recently is Marc—or it’s the three of us. So, the “hand” isn’t always the same in these two different modalities.

Tsurumaki 35:24
The other thing I would say—and maybe this broadens it out a little bit, getting back to the discussion of the shift and our current interest in biogenic materialities—is that it’s not simply the idea that these materials are ecologically better or less environmentally destructive. For us, what’s really compelling is what they imply for architecture.

Of course, it’s better to build with less carbon-intensive materials; of course, it’s better to build with plant-based materials than concrete. But more than that, we feel it’s really necessary—and potentially the role architecture can play is not simply a logic of replacement (something slightly better for something worse), but to really find the capacities for invention and, in a certain way, the pleasure of working with these materials in new ways. This isn’t simply reiterating vernacular forms; it’s thinking about it from a contemporary perspective that learns from indigenous practices and the long histories of these materials, but does so in ways that are innovative and unexpected.

The ways in which thinking about these materials shifts certain preconceived logics about architecture—logics that have been dominant for the last 100 years—is what’s really engaging. To give one quick example: the idea of mass and thickness is put into a very different position. For the last century or so, we’ve tried to make buildings lighter and thinner, to optimize materials. You have the Buckminster Fuller dictum of “How much does your building weigh?” as a kind of ethical measure.

But if we’re thinking about materials like straw—which are lightweight, readily available, and essentially an agricultural waste product ubiquitous globally—then the more of that material we use, the more carbon we sequester, and the more insulating and structural capacity we get. Suddenly, the idea of “Less is More” is thrown into question. Using more material actually has a series of benefits and opens up new architectural potentials to think differently about the heavy versus the light, and thickness versus thinness. For us, that’s really what’s exciting, and it connects back to the necessity and usefulness of these hands-on experimentations.

Miljački 38:16
To go back to that body of work and the way you talk about it on your website right now—I find that interesting. You’re foregrounding “Biogenic” and “Reuse,” and then allowing all other projects to follow simply as “Projects.” I find this reordering or emphasis really remarkable. I realize what you’re messaging in terms of importance, but I’m also interested in thinking about the lessons that travel between them.

Are there lessons that go from Reuse to Biogenic? From ground-up commissions to Reuse? What is the order by which these are informed or elevated by you as the key things to think about? It might be useful here to talk about specific projects. In a lecture at Columbia, Marc, you talked about the Steeple Pier as a kind of reuse or repair project; then The ContemporAry Austin as a relevant piece; and also the High Q Early Childhood Education Center in Bentonville—that’s a ground-up project, right? Somehow these projects all connect to an ethos about the planet.

D. Lewis 39:56
Part of what is underlying our shift on the website to foregrounding biogenic materials aligns with past practices: celebrating existing buildings and doing transformative projects that look at not tearing down, but actually reusing—seeing our work as yet another layer of history, a “thickening” of the history of a particular building.

Those are all essentially the same argument: if you look at the impact of building, the first decision you make—whether to work with an existing building or tear it down—is fundamental. We have tried as best as possible to always keep the building if there is an existing one. In the case of a ground-up building, in addition to carbon, the key issue is material health.

This is an essential issue for any new construction. For the Helen R. Walton Early Childhood Education Center in Arkansas, the materials we chose had a direct impact upon the inhabitants, as well as those who made the materials, who built with them, and who will eventually demolish them. The full life cycle, viewed from a standpoint of health and the consequences of our increasingly petrochemical-based material practices—not just on immediate inhabitants but on the broader health of the planet—is the responsibility of the architect.

We have to be saying, “No, we’re not going to use highly toxic materials.” We have to put forward an argument that the consequences of these choices can either be for enhanced life or degraded life. That choice can only come from information—learning from agencies like the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons and other places advocating for knowledge. If you have knowledge and you disseminate it, then the decisions you make must follow accordingly. Otherwise, you’re acting morally and ethically irresponsibly.

Miljački 42:36
You describe the building not as a static moment or an isolated artifact, but as a temporary accumulation of matter and energy—a moment in the cycle of regenerative processes, which you call “form.” You talk about the material life cycle from “field to form” and back again. I love this definition; I think it is the one we are increasingly having to work with. But I’m curious how this thinking manifests in your conversations with potential clients and collaborators. How do they find you? How do you find them?

Tsurumaki 43:19
It’s a super good question. One aspect of it is this idea that we can’t just think about what materials we use and how we deploy them; we have to think about their origins. We have to think about the whole life cycle of the building and what its afterlife is, because these materials don’t disappear—they persist and accumulate in the environment. Thinking about where materials originate is equally as important as thinking about how they’re put together in the form of a building, which, as we argue, is always a temporary proposition at some level.

For example, we could talk about the complexities around the rise of mass timber, which might seem like an uncomplicated good, but we know it leads to complexities in terms of forest management, the rise of monocultures, the loss of biodiversity, and so on. We also know that industrialized agriculture is a form of extraction. How do we think about these things at the broadest possible scale, while focusing on architecture’s role in how materials create form and space?

Luckily, we’ve been fortunate to work with clients recently who are interested in these questions. Among the academic institutions that have been the focus of our practice for arguably the last fifteen years, there is a rise in consciousness about these environmental questions. The University at Buffalo, in relationship to that competition, is a good example; they have internal imperatives to address these questions—reducing carbon, reducing energy usage, and prioritizing the reutilization of buildings.
We’re working with Vassar College now on a reuse project that also deploys biogenic materials. We’ve been working with the Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy on the reuse of two large hangars at Floyd Bennett Field, converting them into an incubator or hub for green technologies. Our insertion into those historic buildings involves biogenic, plant-based construction. And then, at the other end of the scale, is what you were alluding to earlier: to investigate these materials, we’re often creating our own projects within the office and constructing them ourselves.

Miljački 46:32
Do you have industrial collaborators who are working with the materials you’re interested in, or developing the materials?

P. Lewis 46:42
We’re currently—the All-Straw House is done in collaboration with a straw panel company called Dura-Panel. They’ve been a great collaborator in the sense that we’re using their material in a way that is unconventional for them. We’re using it structurally, whereas it is typically used as an interior partition.
These ways of working with things that exist—using design, material configurations, and tectonics to invent new models—are very interesting. One of the difficulties, though, is that for this to really scale, it’s going to require a lot of investment in material production. One of the things we—and architects in general—can do is demand different, better, and more interesting products. But there have to be examples to point to. I think one of the reasons we’re building these projects is to make tangible, legible examples that can act as a point of seduction, so that architectural design is a catalyst for material desires, which then will hopefully spur even more product invention.

D. Lewis 47:59
One of the interesting things in this broader cycle of the practice is that, while we initially began by saying we really want to work in the public space, we’re now finding that to do these “proof of concept” demonstrations, we’re working on smaller projects—sometimes private residences. But we do so in a way that they’re understood to be about a broader set of possibilities for scale.

This is where the thread between “What are we doing?” and “What is our agency?” connects. If you’re working on biogenic-based systems holistically, you’re looking at the full life cycle. That means you’re looking at: Who is going to make them? Where is it harvested? Who are you partnering with as farmers? What kind of practices are you working on? Are they ethical? Are they consistent with the underlying premise?

By expanding those values, you have a ripple effect to make the kind of change you’re arguing for through the form of the building alone. That becomes both exciting and “opportunistic”—but opportunistic in the sense of imagining a better world that you’re enacting through the choices you make. You’re proposing things in a practice of true experimentation. There is a sense of vitality that comes from doing things you’re not 100% sure about, but you know it’s the right direction. You’re invested in it and putting yourself on the line; that is absolutely critical.

Miljački 49:46
You’ve now convinced me that I must also ask you about the manuals. You’ve talked about the clarity and usefulness of the manuals you’ve been producing. They are clearly—to me, at least—generous documents, activist documents, made for others to take up the experiments, findings, or tests. Have you seen them being taken up? And what’s your response when that happens?

D. Lewis 50:19
I’ll just jump in. One of the things we have seen in terms of the Manual of Section is that you travel and give a lecture at another university, and all of a sudden, you look at the drawings on the wall and they tend to be one-point perspective sections. You’re like, “Yeah, it’s pretty great!” But then, it’s like—okay, there are ways of learning and then adapting. You want people to not see it as a static model, but as an opening to other kinds of invention. For us, it’s really reassuring that the work is being picked up as a way of opening up inquiry and expanding dialogue.

Miljački 51:00
I’ll just add another question, which I think you’ve begun answering already. You started by saying “no private space” or no private commissions for individuals, but the Manual of Biogenic House Sections is obviously focused on domestic spaces, and you’re experimenting on that scale. I know there is an argument about scale there, but what went into those manuals?

P. Lewis 51:32
We had a lot of internal discussions about the paradox that we were working on a manual where the focal point was a single-family house, largely while being very aware that the single-family house typology is actually detrimental in comparison to housing [multi-family/collective].

The difficulty—and the decision we made—was that a key aspect of that manual was to make it legible that buildings, in general, are capable of being made from these materials, and that design invention is also possible. One didn’t have to “regress” by shifting to these natural and, in some cases, quite traditional materials; there was a way of moving forward. The house was simply the best and most frequent site for those built manifestations.

We acknowledge that the house is often the site for invention within the architectural world, so it’s not surprising that’s the case. But our goal wasn’t to privilege houses; our goal was to privilege buildings that were completed and that worked through the problems of translating materials into built form. To be honest, our next book would be Manual of Biogenic Housing, or something along those lines—but there weren’t substantial quantities of examples back when we did that book to produce a compelling volume.

Tsurumaki 53:14
To add a fine point to that: even though the issue with single-family houses is that we build too many of them and they’re too big—over a million a year in North America alone—that very fact makes them an interesting point for intervening in the material ecology of construction. The abundance of houses means that if we could shift to other modes of construction or alter material practices—which, at the scale of the house, are not terribly complicated to do—we could have a significant impact. One of the reasons we found primarily compelling architectural examples of these materials in the form of houses is because that scale makes it a useful site for that kind of testing.

Miljački 54:29
A couple of questions about the office, or the studio. We were trying to figure out how many people make up LTL Architects at this moment and how you’re organized, but I think I need to ask you to actually describe that. Has the size of LTL been stable? What does it depend on?

P. Lewis 54:51
It’s been relatively stable, but it has gone through some shifts. There was a period in the mid-aughts where we started to get over about twenty people. We were pursuing larger projects, and growth was seen as being valuable. Currently, we are at about ten, and I think that’s the better size for us.
We like to be somewhat selective about what we take on. The burden of constant marketing is less, and we want to maintain a stable practice. The people in the office are incredibly important; we want them to stay as long as they can, but we don’t want to be in a position where we’re taking on work simply to take on work. To be blunt, with the three of us teaching full-time, the people in our office are really crucial. They provide the continuity that acknowledges when we are teaching and not in the office. A size of ten allows us to be nimble while having a sufficient amount of internal knowledge to take on significant projects and do them intelligently.

Miljački 56:14
Are there procedures by which you might expose that team of ten to the realities of running the office? Do you invite them to think collectively about the commissions or research that you will and will not take?

Tsurumaki 56:33
Yeah, I think we’ve always—maybe it’s the simultaneity of our roles as teachers and practitioners—run the office in many ways parallel to the idea of a design studio. That has always involved, certainly at the level of design, the idea that everybody comes to the table; we have pinups and discussions to review work. It’s not a question of necessarily imposing a design from the top, but really the idea that the best idea starts to presence itself through a process of research, iteration, and thinking about what the terms of the project are.

In many cases, I think our role is more about helping to define and put into comprehensible terms what’s at stake—where the opportunities and challenges are—and seeing the challenges as the opportunities. It’s about understanding the constraints as the places where the invention and imagination in the project emerge. That really does involve everyone.
Physically, the office has always been a very open space. We don’t have private offices; we’re directly accessible to everybody. With ten people, it’s nice—you can just turn to the person at the next desk and they can hear you (which may be interfering with our podcast right now!). It’s a great structure for an office.

We have long-term collaborators; Akanay Akmaral, our Senior Associate, who has been with us for many years, is very involved in all the decision-making regarding projects. We talk to people on an ongoing basis about what’s important for them to work on, what roles they want to play, and what experiences they want to get. We care for the people who work for us and want them to grow, but it’s also true that that’s how you build an effective team—where people gain different forms of expertise and become someone who can really work across the scales of architectural practice, not just someone who is “good at renderings.”

Miljački 59:10
I have a few more questions—some smaller, maybe one bigger. Did you ever regret taking, or not taking, a commission?

P. Lewis 59:29
I think this may be a good opportunity to talk about the difficulties of working with government projects that one thinks are fantastic, but which come with moments of regret. Maybe David could step in on this one?

D. Lewis 59:50
Yeah, I think so. If you look at public projects, some of the most seductive and interesting ones are those that the city owns—particularly in New York, which is a complex city with a lot of bureaucracy. There’s a line here between the investment in a project and the challenge of working within the paralysis of process that is currently the state of administration.

We’ve been involved in two very different public projects. One was the Steeplechase Pier [at Coney Island], which was completed within about six months from the time we designed it because there was a directive: “This must get done.” There is a capacity for making that kind of significant public change when the role of the collaborative team—architect, engineer, contractor—is prioritized.

On the other hand, we’ve been involved in other projects that have been going on for nearly a decade, and we haven’t even broken ground. It’s not because the people working on them aren’t invested; everyone is capable and interested. but the sheer layers of process mean that every single step is delayed—for “good reason” taken in isolation (verifying hazardous materials, double-checking budgets, etc.). But every step means the goal of getting it built recedes. The driving issue becomes internal politics rather than the project itself.

This has consequences for smaller offices where the budget isn’t tied to that decade-long timeframe. The bureaucratic expectation is the same for a small project as for a large one, but you don’t have the overhead. So, a couple of years ago, we chose not to pursue civic projects. We chose not to go after the Design and Construction Excellence pre-qualifications under the Adams administration because the complications were not feasible for us to shoulder as an office. That was a hard decision, because that’s the work we want to be doing.

We have huge hope in the Mandamia administration, because the goal there seems to be: “Let’s make getting things done for the public the driving issue.” We hope to streamline the process while meeting stakeholder needs. We think there’s a huge opportunity ahead, but it’s not without hurdles.

Miljački 1:03:07
How would you describe the conditions in which LTL does its best work? Are all the commissions equally exciting? Are there ideal ones?

Tsurumaki 1:03:20
We didn’t talk to this earlier, and I’m hesitating to say now, but one of the interesting things—Paul talked earlier about the shift into restaurants as a kind of expression of our desire to do public work. One of the consequences of that was that as time went on, and we actually gained a reputation as a practice that could take very little money, extraordinary spatial constraints, almost no time, and convert it into a project that was compelling, materially inventive, and other things—it basically generated a period during which every person who had a vague idea for a restaurant and thought that, you know, they could put one together, would call with the most unrealistic expectations, right?

I have, like, you know—I have $30,000 and three months to get the project operating. And no, and, you know, and really nothing other than a kind of an idea for a name for the restaurant or something like that, right? And so, eventually, that was another kind of “I would prefer not to” moment of sort of saying, “Okay”—and maybe where a certain amount of success becomes a kind of a trap in a way, right? And so we also made a secondary conscious decision to shift away from that.

But the reason I bring that up is that my first impulse in terms of the answer to your question was to talk about the ways in which constraints are actually productive, right? And in those early projects, it was certainly spatial constraints, economic constraints, material constraints, to some degree, right? All of those things contributed to the intensity of the project, right? Because they triggered and catalyzed a certain imaginative response, right? But at the same time, it meant that we had to be very precise about where we—in a way—where we focused, right, and how we deployed the energies in the design, right?
I hesitate to say that now, because I want to be in a position where, of course, that’s the kind of work we’re going after, but I think I would put it maybe slightly differently now, which is, I think—you know, constraints now are both internally and externally generated. I think in a way, we’re operating with this new direction—or not new, but let’s say intensified focus of the office right now—sorry, siren—on the environmental questions that we’ve been talking to, but also projects that are defined in terms of their parameters, right? Where we can start to articulate: where does architecture make a difference? Where can it have a role to play? How can it kind of generate new potentials?

Miljački 1:06:12
Yeah. I mean, thank you for that answer. I was going to offer that Opportunistic Architecture was an argument or a position made circumstantially and with great faith in agency. But I like your—sort of—really updating it for us today. But this makes me think I have to ask you a question I was almost going to put aside, and it may feel like it’s moving backwards to something that you feel is settled. That has to do with the aesthetic dimension of LTL’s projects. I know that’s not what you’re foregrounding—consciously not foregrounding—throughout your body of work, and historically when you talk about it, and yet the work is extremely consistent. How do we think about that? How do you think about that?

P. Lewis 1:07:04
Yeah, I mean, it’s actually good to hear, and maybe it’s consistent from—from two aspects. One is, we’ve always been interested in the spatial invention that could be legible and manifested in the section, right? So it’s not necessarily the image of the building that I mentioned before, but there’s always an interest in: how does the organization, the hierarchies—how does the space get played out vertically, not just in plan?

So that, combined with an interest in different models of material organization that might take ready-made or familiar materials and deploy them in unfamiliar ways—those two kind of arenas, I think, have always—are always constant in the work. And so as we’ve been looking more into, you know, plant-based materials, it’s actually led to a different model. But I think that there’s still the consistent question: what is the alchemical transformation that could take place with the way in which one brings materials together, and how do they get deployed within the vertical articulation of a built form?

So if there’s a consistency, I hope it’s at that level. And to be honest, I think we’re really very interested and excited about the projects that are happening right now, right? In part because the materials are different, there’s a greater relevance for those materials. The relevance of the cardboard and the felt and the, you know, the materials we used back in the early restaurants, was mostly about what could we afford and what could we build with? Now, you can look at these materials through greater—kind of greater impacts in a larger arena, in the environment, in questions of material flows, not just in terms of what one can do within a limited budget in a limited time.

Miljački 1:08:59
And here is the final question to all of you as educators. When talking just today—as we were talking—when talking about the contemporary and the future predicament, you were critiquing the type of subject that Modernism has made out of the architect: the consumer and specifier of products, rather than the inventor of building systems. The question for you, that I hope you can help us all with, is: what would it mean for architecture schools to focus on this latter model, and do you see obstacles in the way of such transformation? And what are they?

D. Lewis 1:09:45
This is the way in which I think all three of us are teaching: to foreground courses, studios, seminars, where the integration and thinking through the full cycle of materials—and consequences from climate justice to material health—is part and parcel of the design and thought process. Which means bringing physical materials into the studio, working on them, doing fabrication—not to train contractors, but to train an understanding of how one works in a time of increased media and mediated knowledge, where the tactical capacity of learning comes to the fore. I think that’s central to the way in which we have to form and set up design and architecture studios, as well as to set up collaborations within academic space to be able to work with knowledge bases that are necessary to be part of the conversation to make fundamental change.

Miljački 1:10:48
Marc, you have some thoughts?

Tsurumaki 1:10:50
As you say, one of the challenges is that we are educating students who are going to enter into basically a profession and a practice where many of these questions and urgencies that we’re raising are not yet implemented, right? Or only implemented in very superficial means, right—through, let’s say, processes like LEED, etc., right, or given lip service by architects. And they have to be able to operate in that world, right? They have to be able to sustain themselves economically, for example.
But at the same time, I do think that it’s our role as educators to at least generate the knowledge that will allow for the shifts that we’re imagining to take place in the future, right? And to essentially empower students with—first of all—the sense that they have the capacity to change things, and to work with imagination and optimism in the face of these, you know, extremely dire challenges that we’re facing.

Part of that is also allowing them to understand the relationship to larger systems. I mean, not only the, let’s say, environmental systems that materials originate in, but I think also making them aware of the fact that the ways in which we practice architecture are inherently constrained and limited by things like building codes, right? By regulatory logics, as well as by dominant constructional practices and economies, right?

And so I think that’s also a dimension of this, right? And again, I do think—even though we’re obviously very invested in the tectonic, spatial, and material consequences of these systems—I think the only way they do scale, the only way they do have an impact and get implemented more broadly, is if architects are also advocating for and taking a role in changing those broader parameters, right? Changing the systems in which we operate and advocating for new ways of moving forward.

Miljački 1:13:04
Paul, Marc, and David, 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.

P. Lewis 1:13:14
Thank you so much.