Chris and Dominic Leong. Image courtesy of Leong Leong.

Rushing to found a firm may seem like a good idea for those looking to keep their creative naivete, but as proven by New York City-based practice Leong Leong, patience and deliberately planned growth pays off. Just over 10 years since its founding in 2009, the small office has already completed a handful of projects that include the first phase of the 180,000-square-foot Anita May Rosenstein Campus in Hollywood, as well as multiple high-end fashion stores, museum exhibitions, and furniture pieces. With even larger projects in the works, Leong Leong shows that widely accepted entrepreneurial mottos like “move fast and break things” don’t always apply so broadly -- architecture requires more than just charisma and fast-cash business acumen.

This week, Archinect talks with Chris and Dominic Leong, founders and partners at Leong Leong and Adjunct Assistant Professors at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where they teach an Advanced Design Studio. In our interview, Chris and Dominic discuss their origins in Northern California, how taking separate paths eventually benefited their practice, and why “deep reading” is necessary for young architects.

I saw you guys moved offices recently. 

Dominic: We've been on Bowery a long time and only recently moved a couple of blocks down the street. 

You posted a photo of the meeting room on Instagram - it's a beautiful space open to the street below. You guys have also had an office in LA, correct?

Chris: Yeah for a while we were working on the Anita May Rosenstein Campus in Hollywood and had a tiny office in DTLA, which we still have.

I want to hear first about growing up in California and later deciding to both attend two different architecture schools here. How did your childhood and separate educational paths eventually culminate in you both deciding to join together professionally? 

Chris: Our father's an architect so we grew up around architecture. It wasn’t ever explicit that we were going to become architects. We had a woodshop, we worked on all kinds of projects, and spent a lot of time making things. We grew up in Napa Valley in Northern California close to the outdoors. When it came time to go to college, I don't think there were many other choices I was considering besides architecture. It felt like the most natural way to funnel all of my interests at the same time. Our father didn't go to architecture school, so there weren’t any expectations of what an academic architecture education would be like. So when I started school at UC Berkeley, academia opened up a whole new world of thinking about the built environment, new ways of making, and started a still ongoing dialogue with architectural history. 

Our father's an architect so we grew up around architecture. It wasn’t ever explicit that we were going to become architects. We had a woodshop, we worked on all kinds of projects, and spent a lot of time making things.

With our father’s practice, our family projects at home, and Dominic at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, we always shared what we were learning. There was a lot of cross-fertilization. 

The same thing happened when we went to grad school. First Dominic went to Columbia’s GSAPP and I later went to Princeton SOA. After school, I went to work at SHoP while Dominic worked at Bernard Tschumi's office. Greg Pasquarelli was Dominic's professor at Columbia and that's how I got a job at SHOP Architects. During those early years our paths wove back together and we were again in a constant dialogue about different aspects of the profession and architecture at large.

Dominic: Right. We literally grew up working on the house that our father designed, which was a kind of mash-up of Kazuo Shinohara and Nor-Cal PoMo. Our chores were to help finish the house. We'd spend our summers sanding and puttying the redwood siding on the house for hours and hours. We grew up in a continually evolving process of making architecture. There’s no start or finish, just a continuous process of making.

We also started skateboarding and would travel to San Francisco to skate. Understanding architecture in the context of an expansive urban setting was a formative experience in addition to the hands-on, almost intuitive understanding of architecture our father taught us. Going from the beauty of our rural home environment to the dense urban fabric had a powerful influence on me.

Going from the beauty of our rural home environment to the dense urban fabric had a powerful influence on me.

When did the idea initially come up that you might want to collaborate one day? Was Leong Leong something you were patiently building toward?

Dominic: No, we never talked about it. I was working independently after Tschumi's with a group of friends doing competitions as Para-Project. Eventually we got a client. The first project I did with them was a Philip Lim store in West Hollywood. This became an ongoing relationship and eventually got to the point where there was more and more work. That's when Chris and I decided to start working together. 

Our work became very global but also simultaneously remained very localized

It took off pretty quickly. We were working globally with our fashion clients—doing retail projects while also doing experimental installation projects in New York for various cultural spaces. Our work became very global but also simultaneously remained very localized. These early days were formative in terms of how we thought about working with materiality in projects which were either across the globe or down the street. Designing remotely was very different from building installations with our own hands and our own team. When we did things ourselves, we could control everything and there was an immediate feedback loop between design and construction. We were doing a project in Seoul when we became fascinated with how to design while anticipating different degrees of control and precision. This was also at a time when the profession was obsessing over digital fabrication. There was a romantic notion of high-precision digital fabrication that could just do anything in Rhino and then rapidly prototype and produce seamlessly. We eventually found that it doesn't really work if the culture of construction doesn’t have the same technological capacities. Too much reliance on technological solutions becomes counterproductive and inefficient if it doesn’t take into account all practical realities.  

Those early experiences informed how we thought about practice as a feedback loop between our academic disciplinary training and a history of ideas, but also between the realities of practice and how those need to be in constant dialog with each other in order to be effective. From the beginning, we’ve been mindful not to become an academic practice doing speculative work and then trying to figure out how to implement it at some later point. We've always straddled the context we're working in, issues of practice, and ideas from our disciplinary history. This feedback loop has defined what we’re trying to accomplish as a practice. 

How many people are in your office currently? In regards to future growth, is there an ideal size you’d like to operate at?

Chris: My ideal is around 25-30. I've worked in different offices at different scales. I worked at Richard Gluckman's office when they were about 25-35, and I worked at SHoP when they were also about 25-35. But I was also there when they were 70 and then when they were in the hundreds. So, I think the ideal size is that 25-35 range where you can still touch every project and stay involved, and the office still feels cohesive as a culture. I think there are certainly threshold jumps, when you go from 1-3, then 12, then 25, then 50-70. In those jumps there's always something that changes in how the organization needs to function. When you get to that much larger size, the organization becomes much more operationally driven. 

Having an office of 7 is roughly the same overhead as an office of 15. So if you get to 15, you are running a more efficient business model

Dominic: We also keep in mind what type of work we want to be doing and what capacity our practice needs in order to do that type of work. Doing a project at the scale of the Anita May Rosenstein Campus requires a certain capacity; however, there's also economies of scale which are why numbers usually double. Having an office of 7 is roughly the same overhead as an office of 15. So if you get to 15, you are running a more efficient business model. 

There's always an issue of maintaining coherence and the ethos of the work when you scale. There are obvious examples of practices that have scaled up well and others that haven't. A lot of it is context-dependent. A good thing we have learned as we have looked to other practices historically, or even contemporary peers in different cities, is that context is such a huge factor in terms of what makes sense for practice. Equally important is what type of work you're doing. What gets lost often is that we look at architecture from wherever it is, from whatever time period, without any sense of the complexity of contextual factors that were addressed in the production of that work. In school, we just looked at them as amazing buildings. But when you start practicing, you realize architecture is a product of its context as much as it is an idealized notion of what it claims to be. 

when you start practicing, you realize architecture is a product of its context as much as it is an idealized notion of what it claims to be. 

I’m really captivated by Float Tank 01, a sensory deprivation chamber installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao’s “Architecture Effects” early last year, which was intended to trigger altered states of consciousness. I feel a sense of serenity and sublimity in a lot of your work and so I couldn’t help but wonder if your overarching “project” can be condensed into the ideas behind Float Tank 01’s elevated sense of detachment and meditation. You built it and it was installed in a museum, but I could easily see it be something you keep in a back room in the office, as the project was about the phenomenological experience of an anti-space, a void within which you would access your inner being.

Dominic: Float Tank 01 is part of a series of other projects that started with the Toolkit for a Newer Age, which is a strand of research we are exploring within self-produced, commissioned work structured more like an art project. The Toolkit for a Newer Age was a meditation that we adopted from Foucault, “technology of the self.” These are practices which individuals engage with that have to do with improving oneself as part of a personal transformation. We were noticing this reemergence in contemporary culture of yoga, meditation, and self-care. These are ancient practices that have become relevant on a mass scale for people trying to cope with rapidly accelerating technology and the effects it has on our mental health and cognitive abilities. We were interested in the polarity between contemporary technology and ancient practices so the first Toolkit project identified primitive tools which would invoke a ritualistic practice between two people. The question being asked was "What is a basic technology that enables care for oneself while remaining dependent on care for one another?" The individual and collective are inextricably linked in how we care for each other or care for ourselves. We were trying to go back to an elemental, almost archetypical scenario in which that would happen. So we made the installation out of Himalayan salt, which was a sort of tongue-in-cheek reference to spas and woo-woo culture. 

This project led to Topo, which was a sound bath. We then produced the rocker series, Light Rocker, Heavy Rocker, for Friedman Benda. We were thinking about the body and how to create a more open-ended relationship to a piece of furniture rather than a single static posture. We made super sculptural athletic objects that engage the body like a yoga ball. Eventually this thinking led to Float Tank 01. So this is a series of projects that investigates embodiment as well as the relationship between self-care and care for others. 

Part of what Foucault talks about regarding the “technology of the self” concept is the ancient Roman bathhouse. It was a cultural space where the practice of self-care was actually related to the care of the city. We were really fascinated with the trans-scalar possibilities of care for the city that would actually come out of care for our bodies. Float Tank 01 was another “technology of the self” which taps into these same observations and how post-hippie technologies were developed to explore consciousness. The float tank was invented by John C. Lilly for use while taking psychedelics because he wanted to create a sensory deprivation environment to isolate his experience. We were thinking about these domestic objects that are in between tool and sculpture that could recompose the domestic environment for 21st century living. These archetypes would be reinvented and then would allow for these new modalities of living together. 

You touched on materiality earlier, but specifically in Turning Pink and Soft Brutalism, I want to hear how you identified materiality as an interest for you two. 

Chris: Going back to when we first started practicing together, the work would often originate from a material investigation and then a project would grow from there. Some of our earliest projects, like Turning Pink or Soft Brutalism really evolved out of a specific interest in a material for its tactility or sculptural quality. This interest would then evolve into our thinking about how the material investigation could scale into an environment and how it could accommodate people, behavior, or a social interaction. Materiality is at the root of how we approach work. Our interest in materiality has multiple rationales. Texture is something we're always interested in because there is a certain legibility to it. 

Some of our earliest projects, like Turning Pink or Soft Brutalism really evolved out of a specific interest in a material for its tactility or sculptural quality. This interest would then evolve into our thinking about how the material investigation could scale into an environment and how it could accommodate people, behavior, or a social interaction.

Someone came into the office the other day and was like, "Oh, I get it. You guys aren’t at all interested in flat walls. You just like putting texture on everything." I think there's something to being tactile while also legible, creating something that produces effects as you move around it. This idea can also scale. It's rooted in sensation, tactility, animation, and orientation. Materiality is always embedded in the projects that are most interesting to us or that are the closest to home. That's why I think that projects like Float Tank 01 are material objects that also have a deeper thread of research embedded in them.

Dominic: We have certain aesthetic preoccupations that oscillate between weirdness and elegance. Weird aesthetics are important because they create a sense of the unknown within the everyday. Materials are a way of creating an encounter with something that can deflect the normal. We're always looking for weird materials or for weird appropriation of familiar materials. We like to use them in a way that's uncommon. 

There's also a dialog between material having its own autonomy and then trying to control that material to a certain degree. Soft Brutalism uses a soy-based spray foam that has a limited degree of control in its application but there's a very precise figural dimension to its underlying support structure. We're interested in tensions between in-control and out-of-control, familiar and foreign,  soft and hard.

Chris: Yeah. I also think there's an interest in provoking interactions with people. We are intrigued by surfaces that have a duality—hard and soft, matte and shiny, rough and smooth—these tensions compel you to touch or engage with them. For us, there is an interest in the social dimension that architecture affords as opposed to thinking about architecture as pure form or pure diagram. I find the human quality of materiality interesting. 

We have certain aesthetic preoccupations that oscillate between weirdness and elegance. Weird aesthetics are important because they create a sense of the unknown within the everyday. 

Dominic: Finding weird materials works against the clarity of the diagrammatic process. There's a wonderful tension between a clear diagrammatic process and a disturbing, unpredictable material. 

Chris: It's also about a sense of discovery and curiosity, because when you focus on working with a new material, you also can't predict exactly its outcome. We've discovered a lot of things in projects like Soft Brutalism. That project just evolved the more we played with the foam material. The diagram actually changed as we prototyped the material more and more to the point that it became an interior ramp that you wanted to experience with shoes off so that you could feel the weird texture of the foam.

What do you think was a common misconception that you came across that emerging young architects fall into when entering professional practice, let's say a year or two out of an M.Arch?

Dominic: Contemporary entrepreneurial tech culture has created an expectation that it’s possible to just jump into a situation and become a CEO. Unfortunately, architecture doesn't work like that. This is not to say that youth is not valuable in the process, but this is such a complex profession that there is virtue to humility and understanding the journey of practice. There are levels of learning that need to happen and there's virtue to knowing what you don't know, embracing that, and just trying to learn as much as possible.

Contemporary entrepreneurial tech culture has created an expectation that it’s possible to just jump into a situation and become a CEO. Unfortunately, architecture doesn't work like that. This is not to say that youth is not valuable in the process, but this is such a complex profession that there is virtue to humility and understanding the journey of practice.

There is that Socrates quote that was like, "I only know that I know nothing."

Dominic: Right, but there's an aspect to not knowing what you don't know in that you try things a more experienced person might rule out. Ideally, there is a degree of self-awareness between knowing and not knowing, and strategically leveraging that awareness to think in the most productive, creative ways.

What advice do you find yourself giving students more often these days? 

Dominic: Read books. Study architecture, study buildings. Do deep readings of buildings, not just cursory Internet scans. People read architecture differently now, which doesn't mean that architecture should be produced for this reading style. Pre-internet education is very different in terms of the consumption of architectural knowledge. I still think there's value to a deeper, slower mode of reading. At the same time, I think there's a huge value to being able to surf the waves of the Internet, which has its own intelligence. I find ourselves constantly referencing precedents, and encouraging our students to actually go visit buildings, not just look at them on the Internet. Go to the building, go to a library and get the book on the building, do deep reads, read drawings, not just images. That would be my advice. 

Read books. Study architecture, study buildings. Do deep readings of buildings, not just cursory Internet scans. People read architecture differently now, which doesn't mean that architecture should be produced for this reading style.

Chris: Yeah, I would agree with that. Go see actual buildings and formulate your own opinions about them. I always remember when I first went to Casa del Fascio, I had a completely different reading about the building as opposed to how it was discussed in terms of a post-structuralist representational project. The building is beautiful. It's covered in stone and it has such a different material quality that no one ever talked about when I was in school. It gave me such a different impression of the work that I would have never uncovered unless I went there. I also say to students that architecture is a discipline and requires endless curiosity. That's both a practical and personal consideration because there will always be so many unanswered questions. Even if you've done architecture for a long time, you're always going to encounter something you don't know how to do. You have to have the curiosity to figure out what questions you want to keep asking. Immersing yourself in different things that are outside of architecture is critical. 

There are, of course, many different ways to specialize, but architecture increasingly requires you to be agile. You have to expose yourself to technology, to social events, to the arts, to pragmatic things, because that's the way in which you find architecture's use in the world. You have to always be curious about what else is going on, as opposed to simply learning the discipline. Architecture is changing and evolving and it's bleeding into so many different things. In the future, there are going to be many different roles for the architect as opposed to holding on to it as this very singular discipline. Also, paying attention to the environment should honestly be the highest priority for future architects. 

Dominic: The edges of the future of practice will be much harder to define relative to technology and the environment. It will require a balance between deep reading and agility, knowing which modality to inhabit relative to the given situation. 

Chris: Architects are going to have to do a better job of bringing architecture into the world as opposed to people coming in your door with an architectural problem. I think there's a different way in which we will have to embrace the discipline. Historically, architects were problem solvers and holders of knowledge. But that's changing with the role of information and open access to technology. The discipline of architecture will still be relevant, but we need to apply architecture to the world or else its relevance will dissipate.