Low Design Office partners Ryan Bollom and DK Osseo-Asare. All images courtesy of Low Design Office.

Featured in our latest Studio Snapshot is Low Design Office, a small, integrated, and highly collaborative architecture studio based in Austin, Texas and Tema, Ghana. Founded by Ryan Bollom and DK Osseo-Asare during their grad school years at Harvard GSD, the firm's work on both continents is driven by a compelling ethos of resourcefulness, practiced sustainability, and equity building through design. 

The team was recently honored for its accomplishments by The Architectural League of New York with one of this year's coveted Emerging Voices Awards.

Can you tell us how Low Design Office was founded?

We started LowDO fifteen years ago, in the middle of grad school, because the way we were being taught seemed obsolete, or at least out of touch with the reality that we perceived; that architecture — as a discipline and as a profession — is based on a false dichotomy.

Architecture mirrors money and power. “Architecture” aspires to the status of “high culture”: “high class” means sophisticated, “high quality,” “high performance,” design as luxury, all these things associate “being modern” with high cost and high impact on the environment. Fashion, wealth, and influence all come with a high price tag. But the idea of “high society” is fundamentally about exclusion: it defines “lowness” as something vulgar or unrefined that is somehow beneath architecture, good taste, and good design. “Low” corresponds to the lower classes, to the street and the ghetto, to popular — in the sense of belonging to the masses — so therefore, undesirable; low-cost means cheap and low-quality means inferior, but sometimes also low carbon footprint...because “low” means the absence of a lot.

We view this as a solution.

When we launched LowDO, the global financial crisis was unfolding into the Great Recession. Now, our home planet is even more in crisis, but we still believe in the same principle we did then: architecture benefits if we engage resource-constrained contexts as sites of design innovation.

How many people are currently employed at your studio? How is your office structured?

We are just two partners — DK has led our work in Africa while Ryan has led most of the work in the US. We’ve brought on short-term collaborators (we currently have one) but have preferred to focus on collaborating across fields and disciplines. This allows us to fully immerse ourselves in all projects, often including their construction where we manage, labor, craft, and make with others.

You are based in Austin, Texas and Tema, Ghana. Can you talk about the benefits and challenges of maintaining operations on two continents? How do the design mentalities in both locations influence each other?

We’ve been a Transatlantic practice since finishing grad school, so we’ve been working in the virtual office environment long before the pandemic. Fully integrative collaboration can be difficult at times, especially when DK has been in more remote locations, but working across the two continents has had 2 significant benefits: 1) We’ve built a global profile, and 2) We’ve been able to work on urban-scale projects and architectural typologies in Africa that a traditional start-up practice in the US doesn’t immediately have access to.

Architecture benefits if we engage resource-constrained contexts as sites of design innovation.

In contextualizing our work recently, we’ve realized our design concepts and strategies in Africa and the US have much more in common than one might imagine. We are able to prototype similar ideas in different contexts, analyze, iterate, and work towards optimizing systems and processes.

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

Early on, we envisioned a 15-20-person integrative design workshop that folded in research and education, but now we realize the benefit of shying away from growth — it allows us mobility to move in and out of all facets of the built environment while remaining deeply involved in a limited number of projects. Instead of mentoring and learning from employees, we are able to develop stronger relationships, and knowledge transfer, with the full ecosystem of participants involved in the design and construction process: our clients, collaborators, and the spectrum of construction labor.

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

Finding balance between life and work, something we consider fundamental to successful practice. The office is ultimately centered around the fundamental question “how to achieve more with less,” inherently suggesting an endless loop of optimization with limited resources. This is stress-inducing, not stress-relieving.

For us, low design means a number of things, but ultimately it's about building equity in society.

What challenges have you faced during the past pandemic months? Are you sensing a return to "business as usual" soon?

It's a very odd notion to reflect on, but not much has changed in how we operate since we’ve always worked remotely, and we’ve been fortunate to receive some humbling recognition. The social and ecological principles that have always guided our design approach have positioned us well to operate in the current climate.

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

For us, low design means a number of things, but ultimately it's about building equity in society. We try, in small and incremental ways, to improve human and planetary well-being through design and making. We work to say “No!” to imperialism and “No!” to neocolonialism, to find out if low design can help us evolve out of non-regenerative systems of extraction and exploitation. If we can lower the barrier to accessing design and architecture for environmental well-being, then this is low design.

We work to say “No!” to imperialism and “No!” to neocolonialism, to find out if low design can help us evolve out of non-regenerative systems of extraction and exploitation. 

Low design is about making broad or high-level change concrete and tangible by working with people to build or realize their space. So we are particularly interested in how we can collaborate with clients and support a seamless design to deliver process flow. Mostly we do design/build, but we follow a similar approach for projects from urban to building scale. But low design is also about identifying problems where they appear on the ground, and enacting design as sustained action in the form of a site — or issue-specific intervention. This approach takes a site of design investigation into research and design procedures, in order to generate the circumstances that can bring about feedback loops of positive change in communities.

Where do you see Low Design Office in 5 years?

Operating as we do now with a larger group of collaborators, projects, and a bit more security.

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

We’ve generally referred to the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Project as the most rewarding and most representative of our comprehensive approach to design, but currently, we are really excited in our housing research. All of our residential projects have explored ideas of incremental and adaptive housing, which we’ve really started to push over the last couple of years. We are currently developing the “Adaptive House:” similar to models of “Open Building,” the arrangement of a series of modular housing blocks offers inhabitants micro-capacity to resize and reconfigure their dwelling units according to a sequence of possible scenarios. This general capability of all the people living together in a neighborhood to jointly reconstruct it over time — through largely autonomous small-scale market-driven procedures — enables democratic community formation and mobility otherwise absent in expensive, rapidly growing markets.

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

Collaboration. Sustainability. Equity.