This piece is part of KoozArch Issue #06 Serve and Protest.

Shumi Bose/KOOZ Thanks so much for joining from your East Village studio. As a student during the late nineties and noughties — the era of icon-building starchitects — I felt immediately empathetic with the work of LOT-EK and its punk, DIY approach. Was I right to perceive you as somewhat radical or anarchic in your position towards architecture, and does that still hold? 

Giuseppe Lignano Yes, we are. Absolutely. You know, this has been going on for 35 years and our attitude hasn't changed much, or at all. We are practitioners; we work for clients, with commissions and stuff — but it's a very different relationship, if we compare ourselves to all our peers. It's been an act of resistance as we’ve been outsiders from the very beginning. For the longest time, we were making things without even drawing anything. We made stuff with our bare hands and not only with things that we found in the street — we would make things, we would do it ourselves.

It was only when we were called by an editor compiling one of those ‘40 under 40’ books — at that point, we'd already been going for a few years — that we realised that we didn't have a single drawing. We had built a shop, a series of installations, a penthouse right under the Empire State Building, a loft — but we had no drawings; we had to make them retrospectively.

We always said that we want to work in the same way that an artist would work, simply to put our proposals into the world. That’s how it started, and even when the commission started to come, people would come to us because they want that approach, right? For us, that was a view that we had from the beginning, of wanting to work independently — just as artists had been working for about a century at that point. We were not at all interested in architecture as a profession; we were totally for architecture as a practice. It was always more important to have —

Ada Tolla … The creative side. Creativity was really the centre. In a way, it's an old way to think about architecture: architecture as art, first and foremost, before all the technicalities that can completely suck you dry, right? 

KOOZ Could we say, before architecture was considered as a service industry?

GL I mean, in the Western world, the architect was a builder for a long time: a maker, an artist. Of course, you cannot build Brunelleschi’s dome by yourself, you need a crew — but you are a maker, rather than somebody that only does drawings, with a whole bureaucracy that then makes things happen. For us, the act of resistance in not wanting to be “professional” architects, was also — as Ada was saying — comes from a creative standpoint, in terms of what's expected by the architect as a professional. This turns architecture into fashion, into trends, into something that is much less expressive — especially if you're researching a different type of aesthetics, a different type of everything.

In terms of our enamourment with the industrial leftovers — really just the discarded stuff from what we've produced for at least 100 years — on the one hand, the more anonymous the object is, the more interesting it is to us. You know that it has been created through a set of rules and regulations, with technological smarts and so on, but with no real intent of design or expression. But on the other hand, it’s monstrous, because it's just so invasive: this industrial detritus is everywhere, it's really problematic. The idea of tackling it head on and wanting to see the wealth in what was being left behind — both conceptually and materially — is about looking at the great opportunity we have to transform it, to make what we need out of it.

AT I also want to look at it from the other side. Firstly, the word service, or being of service — these are words that I feel close to, they're values for me. In thinking about and declaring that we wish to operate more as artists, it's not about separating ourselves from humanity or community by any means; rather it’s the opposite. This aspect of diving into the leftovers, trusting the intuition, working with the imagination to reconceive them in a different way: there was always a way to find some playfulness, the surprise of the unknown. For us, it was a way to communicate with people at large — even with kids, because this is not only an intellectual endeavour. Our practice is also very conceptual at its core, but a lot is connected to the idea of serving in a different way. Maybe it’s a question of who we are serving, or what are we serving? But those words, for me, are very dear.

KOOZ And why should it not be a service to demonstrate joy or provide pleasure? Or to indeed demonstrate that you can both make a living and make a living space for people by working in this way.

GL Absolutely. It's typically read as a negative statement, to be “in service” — the main criticism being that it is typically a service of the upper classes; service for the people that can afford it, or for the powerful, right?

The idea of service for people in general is a very different thing. Servicing power is about confirming largely to white, male, cis-gendered priorities; those are the values that you need to confirm over and over and over again. Caring about people is, for us, not an exceptional calling; there is a basic need to provide dignity and other important values. Even as we wish to be groundbreakers or push different aesthetics, we still are very concerned about dignity and comfort — but not from the point of view of a dominant class. As they say, we don't care about ebony and ivory: we also think about other values like joy, surprise and colour.

AT Another note: I feel that the term “service” immediately imposes a hierarchy, with somebody above and somebody below, while instead dialogue is such an important part of what we do. Dialogue is central to architecture in general, but in our practice, it's also about a set of thoughts, a set of ideas, a way to work with certain materials and objects, together with the input that comes from the other side, right? What happens when the external input crashes against this set of ideals and approaches that we have developed as LOT-EK? That's a really important thing — our dialogue is not hierarchical, it’s about how we approach something. This is slightly offset from a more traditional idea of service.

KOOZ I’ve been revisiting and referring to the film ‘We Start With The Things We Find’, which you made with Thomas Piper in 2023 — and in which we can share in your enthusiasm, pursued over decades, as active bricoleurs. It’s a beautiful film; may I ask what was the genesis of that?

AT Like everything in our lives, it was unplanned. We didn't know Tom; he came to our studio one day and he said, “I'm a filmmaker, and I see this house that is getting built. I live very close, and I'm curious about your work. Shall we do something together?” And we said, sure. We told him that the house — Carroll House in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — would go up in no time at all; in reality, it ended up taking years.

GL … And it was supposed to be a short film, but it’s close to 90 minutes! Thomas was working for a production company called Checkerboard, making short films on art, architecture — it’s a cool nonprofit production company here in New York. He made one very beautiful movie called Five Seasons, about Piet Oudolf, the horticulturalist of the High Line.

AT The film on Piet Oudolf is really all about nature, whose favourite season is the fall or autumn— perhaps not what you expect from a gardener!

GL He does not pick the plants just for the prettiness; so basically we're talking about the same thing —

AT Yes, it’s the fact that things age and transform; beauty resides in other things, not just the pretty thing.

GL Or not what we've been taught to think of as “pretty” —

KOOZ That seems deeply connected to the visceral delight that you take in the mechanical, industrial and the brutal; things that are generally seen as crude or even monstrous. You are both from Naples, a city that also feels somewhat raw and unromantic, in the most vital way — so is your approach related to a political position, or a nostalgic one?

AT Yes, on one hand, it is exactly like that. We grew up with that stuff all around us — which trains your mind to look at things in a different way, as there is always a lot of ingenuity in the ways that one can ‘make do’, right? Of course, coming to New York City also afforded us another leap, because suddenly we saw a completely different reality in front of us. The landscape of the United States felt very exotic to us; in fact New York City in the late eighties was broke, in total economic depression — which is why we could get our former studio in the Meatpacking District. It was a very rough time, lots of the shops were closed (interestingly, the post-Covid empty city felt similar). There was a serious economic hardship, which was nevertheless overlaid on a very exuberant and majestic city, at a scale that we had not experienced before.

Coming from a place like Naples, this roughness didn't scare us. Since the beginning, we felt that this city was somehow more real. It was never set up for the cute middle classes, it had everything. At the time, there were so many incredible shacks, built with almost nothing but incredible ingenuity. Giuseppe and I were even photographing them and recording this stuff at the time, perhaps because it's a hard thing to come to terms with — one doesn't want to glorify hardship, of course. But seeing the city emerging, across cultures, status, layers — this was incredibly inspiring. Inspiration is also in the friction created in those conditions. I think friction is a very important condition for us. Friction is creative matter, right? It really is the yeast, the ‘orientation’ — it is what makes things come together. So that friction was a really important thing for us to find. It doesn't have to create boundaries between one thing and the other. Friction brings the unexpected in all of our lives, it’s what opens us up to something else.

This brings us back to service, which is a tough word. Close to serving, or servant, it suggests a sort of bowing down to a set of orders, to someone else's will. Yet the word service is also rooted in interaction, between someone or with something: in our case, both people and objects, leftovers, things. That interaction is the core of our creative work: with one another, with the people we design for and with, and interaction with the objects we take and transform. In both cases, these interactions are not linear or one-directional but full of the back-and-forth, pushbacks and resistance, in the most positive way. After all, ‘servicing’ is also a way to repair, and we also like to think of what we do as a form of repair. Service, servicing and creativity connect us with one another and with the way we manipulate and reimagine things.

KOOZ Particularly today, seamlessness and smooth transitions are privileged, and seen as the desirable outcome —

GL It's really a matter of complexity, and not wanting to reduce that. The act of resistance is always being against that, right? There is an aesthetic or a cultural ideal — one that is very flat — which is typically what architects are supposed to do as a service, instead of seeking complexity. And that complexity comes from that. It comes from the friction. Earlier, we were talking about our love for the crude, even the monstrous; it’s not so much about celebrating the grotesque or the monstrous; it’s more about the banal: the things that happen because they just happen, things that surround us. What do you do with them? Looking at those shacks made by New Yorkers, people find all sorts of stuff to build with — perhaps especially in a first world society — resulting in weird juxtapositions: real-estate signage, glass, pieces of hoarding and so on. The literal and phenomenal messages become very mixed, frictions are expressed, and that's what we often seek out.

AT Again, being in this country gave us a huge sense of possibility because on one hand, it was a new ground for us, right? Of course, entering new ground you are pushed to your limits, and you have to experiment. But we also have to credit that particular moment in time, because the complexity of experiencing the city, experiencing the country at large, travelling and seeing all these layers, and then the very experimental nature of Columbia University the year we went there, these two things really merged. Bernard Tschumi was the head of school and there were a lot of amazing professors too, like Lebbeus Woods. Things were starting to move towards the digital; we were on this new ground, and we could test and experiment.

But I think it's interesting now, finding ourselves in our 60s — for instance, moving to this studio, and reengaging with a completely different awareness — with the maturity of having done something for a much longer time, you can still embrace the same feeling of being very experimental, of testing things again. It feels like a really good moment to cycle back and reconnect. And I think the studio is very much also a testament of that sensibility, because it's really full of life. Everybody who comes in says that it feels like our very first studio; we didn't even think about it, but you find yourself on the same ground, with a different degree of maturity, a different level of depth.

Anyway, coming to the United States was really a big change. We had emerged from this very Italian historical system of education; the move instead gave us the feeling we could test some of our own ideas right away — even at Columbia, before we decided to start LOT-EK. We were beta-testing all kinds of things; we basically undid and remade our apartment… Fortunately, we are still in touch with our poor flatmate from the time, who was very patient with us.

KOOZ The film, ‘We Start With The Things We Find’ could be called something like ‘in praise of shipping containers’ — it's a virtual love song to these ubiquitous objects. You describe the patina of the container’s history and materiality, its global journey, with an almost narrative character. Yet there is a certain stigma, specifically against the reused shipping container, depending on where and for whom they are deployed. In some geographies, they are deployed as a most elemental form of shelter — as in emergency or informal housing — while In London, several shipping-container clusters house a type of combination retail-creative-workspace hub, playing off the idea and aesthetic of an industrial chic. Can we talk about the shipping container as a cultural object, as it has evolved?

AT Yes, it's interesting because we are aware that to some extent, our work has generated that, right? LOT-EK’s early work is the origin of some of these phenomena. Of course, it would have happened anyhow, because this object is so omnipresent; its structural intelligence alone makes its reuse seem inevitable. Yet I do think that that we put a higher value on the object, in thinking that we could both take it, absorb it and respect it — but also radically transform it, cut it up along a diagonal, do something with it that wasn't just utilitarian and useful, but actually fantastical. The fact that this ‘industrial chic’ is spreading out is a good thing to some extent, simply because there are so many shipping containers in the world! There's just so many.

KOOZ Indeed, it was different watching you hack these objects in the nineties, as a student — to see you pushing the form — rather than today’s more cynical use of a ready-made object.

AT Well, the idea of stigma is very interesting — it's a word that we almost don't use anymore. It's so interesting how this object is flipped. That stigma was actually very present in our early work with the container as a typology: this unsightly thing that is in the backyards, nobody wants to see this crappy, rusty thing. Within the architectural scene, we are still very much outsiders, perhaps also dealing with this stigma.

KOOZ I think that as a ready-made, the container was perhaps not considered as the tabula rasa one supposedly needs for ‘authorship’, or for developing one’s own expression, as some designers are encouraged to cultivate. It seemed a fairly radical stance of yours to say no to that — indeed, to work with the things you found. You speak about the container so poetically in the film, but I want to come back to your consistency or even commitment to continue to stick with it, through waves of fashion and taste .

AT I think we continue firstly because it took a lot of our blood to get to where we are, in terms of understanding and knowing these objects. Also we feel that we should continue, as long as we discover something new; as long as we can test or reveal something else with the container.

On one end, there's a flow, and we constantly seem to discover that we can do something that we haven't seen with this object: we can test it in another way, and we know in doing so, we learn even more. It's actually quite funny, because now we actually have this disassembled container at the studio — all the details, one to one. You can see how all things are made and how they connect or detach. It's amazing to have developed such a close relationship with this object.

KOOZ Just like the Soane Museum, where architects would ‘learn’ from direct observation of archeological artefacts —

AT Exactly, a perfect example. At the same time, it would be so great to have another couple of lifetimes, to be able to do the same thing with disused aircraft or decommissioned tanks. In architecture, what is difficult is passing through all the layers that it takes for an object like this to become a viable, if not inevitable object for reuse and reinterpretation. So it's very challenging to think about experimenting on other things, although the idea of not limiting ourselves to this one object has long been in our thoughts.

GL We had taught one semester at MIT, as a more technological school — we thought that maybe this is the right place to do such work. We split our class in two; half started by looking at the airplane fuselage, and the other half with municipal water tanks, both large, man-made objects which were eventually abandoned and thrown out. They are products of incredible engineering; the fuselage of the airplane, it goes without saying, costs millions of dollars; it needs to be both resistant and as light as possible, so it’s all aluminum. But it costs too much money to cut them down to recycle them; in the machine-graveyards of the Wild West, they call them ‘beer cans’. Everything else from a plane is gutted and reused, including the wings, but the raw fuselage remains in the graveyard — although not in their millions, like containers, right? Containers? The main reason why we still use the container is because it's an invasive species. There are some 150–180 million in circulation, maybe even more.

AT You mentioned ubiquity, but it's more abundance and redundancy.

GL It's really a Marxist thing; it’s about surplus value, or whatever you want to call it — we build more than we could ever consume. The container problem is because of the imbalance between East and West. China manufactures so much; it also makes all the containers, and ships everything that it makes in containers — but the container is like a shoe box. You buy a pair of shoes, and then you're left with the shoe box. Now, the incredible thing is that only 10 or 15% of that 150 to 180 million containers are in continuous motion. The rest sit in container yards, as we see today. There is some local movement — for example, a set of containers might move around in the Mediterranean, from port to port; there is local movement around the Baltic Sea, and in the Caribbean, along the east coast of the United States. In America, we are mainly running terminal ports, with an emphasis on the terminal: the stuff comes from China — it's the same thing in Europe — and the containers never go back east. Instead, they accumulate by the millions. It's crazy: all corten steel. Even the flooring inside a container is made from a single species of hardwood ply that comes from Indonesia — it’s called Apitong, and it's amazing. We've also made salvaged floors just with that hardwood ply, without using the containers.

All of this to say that at a certain level, we stick with the container because we feel a sense of responsibility. It's like the plastic bag — we need to do something with it, as it’s not going anywhere. It's incredible the amount of energy expended to make all the steel for these containers — the carbon footprint is incredible. And then to move them around right on these boats, on ships that pump an incredible amount of oil into the ocean and so forth…. The least that we can do is to use these motherfuckers, to be very honest with you.

The container is also incredible in the sense that it was designed for maximum efficiency: maximum efficiency of transport, maximum efficiency of strength, and so on. So when we use the container, we don't just reuse the material and the object, per se: we reuse the human intelligence. They have been perfected over decades, and they exist in the millions. The fuselage is instead in the hundreds, but still — hundreds! The 727 and 737 have been almost completely retired because they're too old, so they're all in graveyards in the west of the United States, sitting there in the hundreds. But the container cost $1, while a fuselage costs a million dollars. The comparison is inconceivable at the level of materials and cost — even hundreds have the value of many, many millions.

AT We had a commission in the late 90s for the University of Washington; we went there, to Seattle, and of course, we had to visit Boeing. Immediately, we thought: this is our chance. Very early on, we designed a student pavilion on the university campus, using a piece of an airplane fuselage— and then we went to find it. With the help of the university, we found one of these industrial graveyards. So we had found this decommissioned plane and we were ready to build…. and then September 11 happened. Suddenly, a fragment of an airplane took on a completely different meaning, and the project was cancelled. Of course, there were people at the University who really loved the idea and others who were really frightened of it. We did a lot of work towards it, but sometimes things come down to chance. Some projects go through, some allow you to continue testing, and some don't.

KOOZ It was an understandable decision on many levels… but hearing how these objects keep accumulating, I'm shaking my head thinking of the opportunity. This is work that I hope students or future practitioners could take on, if we're talking about reuse and responsible design.

AT It's also a completely hidden economy; you can hardly figure out anything about this stuff. One of our close friends, Leonardo Bonnani runs a firm called Sourcemap, which maps the carbon footprint for companies, among other things. They produce in-depth research in various countries to understand how things move — but on this question containers, how many exist and how many are in current motion, he would often meet a dead end, saying “That's all I can tell you.”

GL I wanted to say that the shipping container has been an incredible discovery, an incredible love affair. As much as we’ve become fixated, it has also become a responsibility for us. We need to use this thing. Then too, we love it. Other people are doing stuff with it, but for us, there is an artistry and an understanding that is pretty uncommon — possibly it's all that is going to be left behind. But I hope that our legacy is not just, “Oh, those are the guys that did the stuff with the containers.” What Ada mentioned is important; it takes a lifetime to understand something like that. Literally, a lifetime. I don't think that we would have enough time, even if we had everybody on our side, to really understand what to do with all of these things.

But I hope that our legacy is the idea of reusing what we make — which is a very old principle. We say it in the movie too. I think it's an old idea. Even our grandmothers would make incredible meals out of leftovers, right? So I hope that there is some lasting attention to that principle, it's a very important thing.

AT But also, it's coming from a creative place, not just an environmental concern. The two things go hand in hand. It’s joyful, it’s creative, it's powerful, it's imaginative. These things too are very important; one doesn't go without the other.

GL… which takes us back to our initial conversation about complexity and friction, right? Naples is thousands of years old, so we are used to the layering upon layering, of function and meaning — the Basilica becomes the market, which becomes a building, that then becomes residential. Things keep growing and changing, it's amazing. For us, that's also a major reference point in our minds. The interesting thing is that although New York is very different from Naples, in some ways it is similar — even in this idea of layering, this compressed layering of meaning in a comparatively short time, even as the technologies shift, as desires keep changing alongside.

KOOZ There's certainly a renewed resonance to your work, now that we are more broadly aware of our responsibility towards the planet. When you entered the scene as a young practice, the DIY aesthetic was still going strong; it was the birth of hacking, something like an extension of punk. There was a sense of possibility in the notion that one could look around and subvert the fallout of late capitalist, industrial detritus in a meaningful way.

I’m not sure how you have kept that enthusiasm up for 35 years, with the same smiles. Perhaps there’s kinship here with the inspiration that you found in a stressed-out yet culturally vigorous city like New York in the late 1980s, seeing people who are able to create things, not necessarily out of dire need, but rather with resourcefulness, intentionality — even fun.

ATYeah, but I also think we keep smiling because we stayed our course, you know? We didn't go elsewhere, finding ourselves thirty five years later still operating at the same misfit angle towards architecture. At this point, we’re proudly standing in this position, where we are doing something that still feels true to us. It also allowed us to think more about how we set up our practice, our studio, and whom we work with, which has made the practice a different kind of place to work. The daily joy of being here is a huge thing: we come to work with people that we love and with whom we love spending time, exchanging, creating. It's those things that allow you to continue smiling because you have been building, a little at the time, the way that you feel good — rather than responding to a preconceived idea of what an architecture office should be.

KOOZ Ada, that sounds like a life-lesson in general. You’ve both been brilliant; thank you so much for your time.

Bio

LOT-EK is a visionary practice founded by Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano in 1993. Operating at the intersection of art and architecture, it specialises in upcycling, which is the art and science of repurposing, remaking, rethinking, reimagining. Over the last 30 years, LOT-EK has worked across a range of scales, from light fixtures, exhibitions, and pop-up experiences, to schools, homes, and housing—with projects in New York to Johannesburg, Korea to Australia. Its work has been exhibited and acquired by international cultural institutions worldwide, including the MAXXI in Rome , the Venice Biennale, MOMA, the Guggenheim, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.