Medium Office is an architecture practice based in Los Angeles and New York. Founded by Alfie Koetter and Emmett Zeifman, their work has been exhibited at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles, Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, and elsewhere. Full-time teachers at USC and Columbia's GSAPP, respectively, the two also find the time to run Project Journal, a publication of both visual and written work that engages in critical architectural discourse.

For this week's Small Studio Snapshot, we talk with the duo about their many ventures, and how they split their time between them all.

How many people are in your practice?

Two.

Why were you originally motivated to start your own practice?

We never seriously considered an alternative. While we each worked for a relatively brief time in offices, we were fortunate to find opportunities to teach full time, which allowed us to devote more time to our own work and to begin to build a practice without facing immediate financial pressure.

What hurdles have you come across?

It’s still too early to have come across real hurdles. The stakes have been too low. If there have been hurdles they have been mental, having to do with developing confidence in the way we work, while at the same time becoming more relaxed as to the question of what constitutes a project. Teaching has given us a lot of leeway to experiment and work incrementally towards a practice. It has given us the freedom to develop our own ideas and aesthetics, which we can now bring to projects with some clarity. Practically, the major question we are confronting is how to find opportunities to realize projects, in order to keep learning and testing our ideas in more complex situations. Right now we are reliant on personal networks, but that is unsustainable and doesn’t reflect our desire to work on more diverse project types and for different constituencies, so we are working to construct a track record of built and unbuilt work that allows us to engage other kinds of audiences and clients.

Is scaling up a goal or would you like to maintain the size of your practice?

We are interested in taking on larger-scale projects and so imagine that we would scale up slowly, but there’s no particular size that we have in mind. Eventually larger than two people. In the short term, that might happen through temporary collaborations, rather than an office staff. We work virtually between New York and Los Angeles, so having employees in one city or the other doesn’t make sense until we have enough paying work in one of those places to support them. We do hope to one day end up in the same city, which would give us an opportunity to invest more in the physical infrastructure of an office.

What are the benefits of having your own practice? And staying small?

At this point, we’re far enough into Medium that we couldn’t imagine going back to work for another practice. As for staying small, we have very little overhead, so we are able to pursue non-commercial projects and our own research and to keep developing through that work. We have a lot of flexibility and autonomy also in how we work, because we are doing it alone and don’t need to act as managers. But staying small isn’t necessarily a goal, it’s just a reality at this point that we try to make the most of.

How do you find yourself splitting time between your various pursuits in the field?

We both teach full-time so we probably split our schedules between that and practice about evenly. When we are working on a new issue of Project, that tends to come out of time that we would otherwise spend on our own writing or speculative work. Maybe it’s fifty percent teaching, ten percent Project, forty percent Medium.

What other mediums of implementation does your office pursue?

We write a lot (project texts for competitions, exhibitions and publications, syllabi, essays) and we participate in exhibitions and other non-commercial forums for projects. We don’t see teaching or our work on Project as direct extensions of our practice, but they help to shape the ways we approach our work and vice-versa. Because we don’t live in the same city, we spend a lot of time texting and sending screenshots back and forth and that has affected our work and our sensibility. We embrace the material reality of the present and try not to be nostalgic about architectural representation. Screenshots, GIFs, compressed images, Photoshop filters, Illustrator stroke settings, Rhino defaults at this point, all of these media are more relevant to our work than the appearance of ink on Mylar.

How do you balance theory and production in your office?

If there is a theoretical aspect of our practice, it comes out of looking closely at the things we’ve done

Between Project and teaching and our own interests, we never work in a theoretical vacuum, but theory doesn’t explicitly drive our work. If there is a theoretical aspect of our practice, it comes out of looking closely at the things we’ve done, describing them to ourselves and to others, and developing an understanding of how they fit into our body of work and the world that we work in. For us, working is always closely tied to description and constraints: working deliberately and precisely through the specific qualities of whatever it is that we are looking at in a given project. Any of things that we produce—whether writing or making models or drawings—can be a means of developing projects and critically reflecting on what we are doing.

What is 5 /10 /15 years down the road?

We want to build a practice that is robust enough that we can find opportunities to work on issues that we’ve been interested in for a long time, particularly urbanism and housing. The most important thing for us right now is practice in the sense of working every day and trying to learn as much as we can through every project, so that in 5-10-15 years we feel like we can pursue any kind of project and be able to make an impact because we have both the technical expertise and the intellectual clarity to address complex problems and push the work somewhere unexpected.

How does academia make its way into your work?

We separate our teaching and our practice more than some others as we don’t necessarily think that teaching our specific working methods would address our broader pedagogical responsibilities and the needs of the specific institutions that we teach at (over the years Columbia, SCI-Arc, UCLA, USC, Yale). We appreciate our students’ interest in Medium but we don’t want to produce imitations of our style, which is specific to our own formative experiences. If we were ten years younger, we would not produce work that looks like ours, so why should our students? Conversely, pedagogical problems are not the same as the problems that you confront in other types of projects. These things operate at different temporal scales and under different pressures, and that is why we enjoy doing both. We learn a lot from teaching, and from the people we teach with, but we don’t directly translate our academic exercises into our work.

What project would you most like to be remembered for?

We’d rather be remembered for a body of work than a specific project. There are many great individual projects that we can think of, but the practices that we really admire are the ones that have sustained a critical and inventive approach over time.

What is the thesis of your office, your work and how has it changed?

Practice doesn’t only describe a professional activity, it describes a method or attitude, a way of engaging a subject

If there’s a thesis, it is only visible in retrospect, and it is the critics’ and historians’ jobs to invent it. Individual projects are driven by ideas, and we have recurring interests and instincts that give the work a certain coherence, but there isn’t one underlying idea that motivates it all. We’ve realized that it is only through practice that we’ve been able to develop our work—not practice in the sense of finding clients, but practice in the sense of thinking about and making architecture every day. Practice doesn’t only describe a professional activity, it describes a method or attitude, a way of engaging a subject—you can practice a musical instrument or a sport or a religion. The discipline of architecture is like that. It requires practice and it can be practiced. If we had to name some interests, they could be: modernism, urbanism, medium-specificity, representation and technology, scale, material, archetypes, rules and constraints, plans, objects and frames. Some of those interests are newer or clearer to us than others, some are more pressing in one project or another, but we’re really just interested in architecture and all of its fundamental problems. That is ultimately the thesis of Project as well. It is a journal with no themes—the theme is always architecture, and most contributors are practicing architects. We think the discipline is important and that working in disciplined ways is important. Maybe that’s a thesis in itself.

How did the office start and what were the first 2 years like?

It’s hard to say when exactly Medium started. We were working on things together basically from the moment we graduated in 2011, and we worked together before that while we were in graduate school, but in 2014, when we both started teaching, we decided to practice together in a more formal way and decided on the name Medium. It spoke both to our interests in disciplinary questions (what is the medium of architecture) and to our interest in producing work with a medium affect. We discarded most of our earlier work and began to focus on something more specific. It’s not too hot, not too cool, not too exciting but not too restrained. Only having to be medium takes the pressure off a little bit. We’re suspicious of the impulse that seems to exist in the field today to immediately have a brand and a signature approach. Historically, many architects don’t do their first significant work until they are approaching forty, or past it. That seems okay to us. As for the first two years, there were a lot of competitions (which we do fewer and fewer of as it’s clear that today, self-generated work can find a real audience, without the exploitative structure of a competition) and a lot of exploring techniques and interests without any external constraints but with many internal ones. Though we weren’t building or getting much attention, it was productive to have that time to develop a body of work without having to force a “project” before we’d practiced making things and articulating ideas. Now that we have the chance to pursue built projects and to exhibit and speak about our work, we don’t have so much anxiety about where to start and what we are interested in.