LOTEK Objects Operations

A unique survey of the projects, products, and processes that define LOT-EK, the firm at the forefront of adapting prefabricated industrial units to create cutting-edge architecture

LOT-EK is a design practice that believes in being unoriginal, ugly, and cheap. Also in being revolutionary, gorgeous, and completely luxurious.

LOT-EK’s work reveals extraordinary transformations of ordinary things - from their famous shipping container projects onward - combining maker culture and hacker culture into beautiful and radical visions for sustainable and meaningful living.

LOT-EK: Objects + Operations surveys dozens of projects - built, unbuilt and in-progress; polemical, practical, and in-between - complemented by photographs from LOT-EK’s multi-year URBAN SCAN project, a vast photographic document of infrastructure and incident, as well as essays by Thomas de Monchaux and interviews with founding partners Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano.

Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano founded New York-based LOT-EK in 1993, designing residential, commercial, and institutional projects in the US and abroad, as well as projects for major cultural institutions and museums, including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim, and MAXXI. Besides heading their professional practice, they also teach at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in New York. In December, Tolla and Lignano were recognized as USA Booth Fellows of Architecture & Design by United States Artists (USA).

Thomas de Monchaux writes for The New Yorker, Architect, and numerous other publications, and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP.