Leroy Street Studio partners Marc Turkel, Morgan Hare, and Shawn Watts (from left to right). Photo: Pankaj Khadka. All images courtesy of Leroy Street Studio.

For New York City-based firm Leroy Street Studio, good design is just one part of the architectural equation. Uniting several, integrated branches under one roof—architecture, community workshop, construction, and interiors—the terms 'multidisciplinary' and 'collaborative' aren't just marketing buzzwords but core values.

For the latest Studio Snapshot, Archinect reached out to LSS partners Marc Turkel, Morgan Hare, and Shawn Watts to learn more about the firm's growth process, integration of disciplines, and community outreach.

Can you tell us how Leroy Street Studio was founded?

During architecture school, we teamed up to design and build a single-family house for Habitat for Humanity. This project cemented our interest in collaboration and the art of building. After graduating, Marc moved to London to work for Michael Hopkins, while Morgan, who had a contracting business before studying architecture, designed and built an artist studio for a client in Connecticut. We reconnected a few years later to set up shop in a former artist's studio located in the backyard of Morgan's home on Leroy Street. We named the new firm Leroy Street Studio to show commitment to an open, creative studio culture. Construction, collaboration, and community are foundational elements of Leroy Street Studio, and remain essential drivers of the practice today.

In the early days of LSS, we founded Hester Street—an independent urban planning, design and development nonprofit that works to ensure neighborhoods are shaped by the people who live in them. Hester Street started as a 'backyard laboratory' for participatory design and has now grown into a thriving, independent organization that offers planning, design, and community development technical assistance to community-based organizations, government, and other agencies.

How many people are currently employed at the firm?

60 inclusive of admin, interior design, architecture, and construction management staff.

How is your office organized? Can you talk about your branch structure?

We have three partners, six senior architects, and a group of experienced team leaders all of whom collaborate on projects together. We run the studio like a workshop where we come together for dialogue through all stages of project development. This approach extends to other collaborators including design professionals, contractors, and craftspeople.

Embedded in the practice is also a community design studio where we work with neighborhood residents on participatory design projects.

We favor an integrated approach: our construction management and interior design teams work across our projects. Embedded in the practice is also a community design studio where we work with neighborhood residents on participatory design projects.

Would you like to scale up and grow your team? What do you consider the ideal size for your practice?

After many years as a mid-sized firm, we reached our current size only in the past five years. While considering committing to a few unique opportunities that would strain our existing resources, we realized our leadership structure and design process could accommodate more teams while maintaining a unified vision. This expansion has allowed us to hire for more diverse skills and interests.

Describe your office culture. How do you nourish it?

We are a close-knit studio, and we spend a lot of time together in and out of the office. It is critical that studio members feel connected to projects across the studio, so we share the work as much as possible. Team leaders meet frequently to present the work and share information across projects. We also update the entire studio on all current projects at least twice a month to share progress and what we are learning. In addition, we have monthly in-depth presentations for teams to share work with the studio.

We create opportunities for both individual teams and the entire studio to visit our built work and benefit from the breadth of project types.

One long-standing studio tradition is to work together on a community project. It started when we founded Hester Street by going across the street to ask the local middle school if they needed any help from our studio. We ended up holding design workshops in the art and literature classes and taking breaks during the workday to pour concrete and build structures in the garden with the students.

This engagement with our neighborhood here in Chinatown also inspired our annual Lunar New Year celebration where we invite friends and community partners into our space for a great party.

What have been the biggest challenges starting and running your own practice?

Working outside our comfort zone and expanding our practice presents unexpected challenges. Taking on construction, for example, was not that big of a leap conceptually, since the foundation of our creative work is understanding how things go together. However, we had to form a new entity, get properly insured and take on a lot more risk. The benefit was that we could also take on a lot more responsibility and thus produce better work.

Early in the practice, we founded Hester Street—an independent urban planning, design and development nonprofit that works to ensure neighborhoods are shaped by the people who live in them.

Having a larger practice for the last several years, we’ve had to work hard to maintain the office culture we had as a smaller studio. We’ve had to formalize many of the ways that we share information—scheduling meetings to share project developments rather than just dropping by someone’s desk. It’s an adjustment but worthwhile. Having a larger team brings its own energy and sense of purpose. It forces us to communicate our goals more clearly as we take on larger, more complex projects.

Describe your work. How do you define your own unique style and approach?

Our aesthetic response is formed through a process of intensive research and iteration. If there is an aesthetic thread that runs through our projects, it's a spirited approach to craft and building technology, a playful integration into the urban context or landscape, and an abiding sense that each project element has to justify its existence. Any beautiful formal design move that does not also provide some degree of utility becomes extraneous.

Committing to an engaged, collaborative process is to embrace a project's messy complexity. And our process needs to be accessible and enjoyable for all project stakeholders. Rather than reduce a project to cartoon diagrams that can over-simplify, we prefer to think of a project as a gathering story or a shared vision where we capture the layers of a project's development over time. We've created specific tools to make this easier such as the 'graphic novel:' a curated collection of sketches, diagrams, notes, and images that evolves over time, allowing client groups and collaborators to contribute, and helping to reconcile different points of view.

We also believe that everyone who will be impacted by the project should have a hand in how it turns out. Everyone on the team—clients/end-users, professionals, craftspeople—are an expert in certain areas, and it’s our job to figure out how to bring everyone to the table. An example of this for public projects is incorporating community members directly into the design team. Our participatory design approach gets people directly involved through design-build workshops. Tapping into the human desire to create and to make is a powerful force and creates an emotional and durable connection to place through physical touch. The work is inherently more enduring if the users have a hand in the making of their built environment. As the project designers, we are responsible for the success of the project, but it’s possible to meaningfully integrate the hands and voices of the people who are ultimately going to use the space. In fact, it makes better buildings!

What do you want your firm to be known for?

We'd like to be known less for a style or aesthetic and more for an accessible process that creates complex, authentic architecture—with an emphasis on the human experience of a building or a place over time. We have been inspired by clients who come back to us years later and tell us that we've made an impact on their lives—it means a lot. We also want to encourage others who are thinking about diversifying their approach to making architecture. The challenges of making successful architecture are increasingly complex and hybrid firm models are more resilient and well-suited to meeting social, environmental, and technological challenges.

Where do you see LSS in 5 years?

We've been very fortunate to work with amazing clients on private projects over the years, and we'd like to use these opportunities to explore new ideas, to find the overlap between formal ambition, sustainability, and defining place. We'd like to expand the community, municipal, and institutional work that we are currently doing to include opportunities for participatory design, allowing more people to have a direct hand in how their spaces are made.

The work is inherently more enduring if the users have a hand in the making of their built environment. [...] In fact, it makes better buildings!

Do you have a favorite project? Completed or in progress.

That's like asking us if we have a favorite child. No!

But it is satisfying to do a project where we know that we've had a big impact. We have learned that the more responsibility we take on the project, the more leverage we have. We also love projects that have built-in contextual challenges such as adaptive reuse projects or projects with a dramatic relationship to the landscape.

For the Shore House, Cube House, and Brooklyn Townhouse, where we did the architecture and construction, we were able to spend more time with the client, more time understanding the nuances of the site and landscape, and more time working through details.

For the library we did in Sunset Park, we were involved in the community engagement process along our partner not-for-profit Hester Street. We then formed a design-build partnership with Sciame, an amazing contractor, and the project culminated in a large participatory design project with local teens. Each partnership brought unique insights that helped to better define the program, context, and design goals of the project.

For the Alley Pond Environmental Center (currently under construction), we partnered with Hester Street to design and sustainable building science curriculum with the educators early in the process. This allowed us to design the building as a tool to help teachers show young students what it means to live in the world sustainably.

At the Paths to Pier 42 project, we partnered with Hester Street, Henry Street Settlement, and other arts and community groups to transform a derelict waterfront site.

For the Dune house, we worked with the client before they purchased the property to help them determine what could be built on a site challenged by coastal flooding.

For the Louver House, we used agricultural precedents—particularly the barn—to design the site and a new building adjacent to expansive cornfields. Playing with scale and blurring building typologies was a particularly powerful tool in the landscape.

For the Office Triplex project, we carved vertical spaces within the iconic form of the Lever House to create social connections, distribute natural light, and provide various conditions of scale for the display of a contemporary art collection.

We designed and built each of our studio spaces starting with Morgan’s house, where he converted his father’s painting studio into our first office. We converted a Chinatown tablecloth factory into our next studio space, which is now home to Hester Street and the LSS workshop. Our current studio space is around the corner in a former garment warehouse, where we have opened a storefront gallery on the ground floor. Working directly with subcontractors gave us the ability to start the construction process earlier and embrace the idiosyncrasies of the original building fabric.

We partnered with Hester Street and landscape architects Grain Collective to create a master plan for the Rochester Public Library system. We studied local needs at each of the 10 branches and came up with a system-wide strategy of both ‘quick wins’ and longer-term modifications to meet future challenges.

With each of these projects, we were able to bring more diverse talent and energy to bear on the project from an early stage through creative partnerships. Each method of engagement and partnership brought additional insight and leverage.

If you could describe your work/practice in three words, what would they be?

Accessible, Complex, Authentic.