Ryan Bollom and DK Osseo-Asare
Courtesy of Low Design Office Ryan Bollom and DK Osseo-Asare

Location: Austin, Texas and Tema, Ghana
Year founded: 2006 (informally) while in grad school
Firm leadership: Ryan Bollom, AIA, and DK Osseo-Asare
Education: Bollom: B.S., Duke University; M.Arch., Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD); Osseo-Asare: B.A., Harvard University; M.Arch., Harvard GSD
Experience: Bollom: KieranTimberlake, MOS; Osseo-Asare: Alero Olympio, MOS
Firm size: Three to five

For this concept city in Anambra State, Nigeria, the firm calls for sustainably sourced materials, including earth blocks made of locally sourced sand and clay.
Courtesy Low Design Office For this concept city in Anambra State, Nigeria, the firm calls for sustainably sourced materials, including earth blocks made of locally sourced sand and clay.
Courtesy Low Design Office

Mission:
Our goal is to find and finesse an integrative systems approach to building—what we call “low design,” or realizing more with less. We believe that spaces shape well-being, that humans and ecologies perform best at low stress levels, and that optimizing efficiency with harmony can maximize the power of the built environment. Our buildings don’t shout at you. We want our work to be like that person you meet for the first time, but feel like you have known forever.

First commission:
United Teen Equality Center, a participatory design-build process with youth from the center. We led this project together while in grad school and it spurred us to form the practice.

Intended to encourage maker ecosystems across Africa, the mobile Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform provides infrastructure for those interested in upcycling waste into new products.
Julien Lanoo Intended to encourage maker ecosystems across Africa, the mobile Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform provides infrastructure for those interested in upcycling waste into new products.
Com_Ghana_Accra_DKOsseaAsere_Agbogloshie__SpaceCraft_20160213
Julien Lanoo Com_Ghana_Accra_DKOsseaAsere_Agbogloshie__SpaceCraft_20160213

Favorite project:
One of our most challenging projects is the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP), which we co-initiated with Panurban, the French design consultancy led by Yasmine Abbas. AMP is a hybrid physical and digital open-maker architecture that emerged from a multi-year co-design process based out of the Agbogbloshie scrapyard in Accra, Ghana. It is a pan-African project to reimagine the future of design and architecture, but also of our relationships with products, waste and e-waste, and materials in the current age of consumerism. We talk about it on our TED Talk.

Second favorite project:
The Dakota Mountain Residence, finishing this year, is a project that features much of what we have explored over the past decade. Set on five acres of land in the Texas Hill Country, the house engages contemporary lifestyles as a retirement residence with intermittent intra-family co-housing for grandparents to host their children and grandchildren and as a sustainable structure fitted with a double roof system, solar screening, buffering and cross-ventilation to eliminate the need for air-conditioning, and rainwater harvesting makes the house water self-sufficient. Client needs drove the form and structure of the project, together with questions around how to live in a climate-conscious way today.

The Dakota Mountain house in Dripping Springs, Texas, features a 2,000-square-foot main house and a 1,100-square-foot guest house that are both encased in a unifying detached outer envelope to protect the structures from the outside elements.
Courtesy Low Design Office The Dakota Mountain house in Dripping Springs, Texas, features a 2,000-square-foot main house and a 1,100-square-foot guest house that are both encased in a unifying detached outer envelope to protect the structures from the outside elements.
Courtesy Low Design Office

Origin of firm name:
The inspiration for our name was based on the proposition that high art borrows from “the low,” an idea introduced by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in their book, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Cornell University Press, 1986). They explain that transformative innovation in creative fields most often originates when the creator must overcome limited means and resources to provide meaning in their work. We prefer to work within this space.

Decision to become an architect:
We both started out as engineers but realized we wanted to pursue architecture after finishing our undergraduate degrees. We have a natural attraction to rigorous technical precision, but simultaneously feel a need to solve open-ended problems that require creative solutions. We pivoted to design because we want to make the world more beautiful—which happens when things work properly and efficiently—and, at a systems scale, we find that architecture ultimately becomes about building physical harmony.

This 2,900-square-foot vacation residence in New Braunfels, Texas, is designed to accommodate a multigenerational family and leverage views of the nearby Guadalupe River.
Casey Dunn This 2,900-square-foot vacation residence in New Braunfels, Texas, is designed to accommodate a multigenerational family and leverage views of the nearby Guadalupe River.
Casey Dunn

Greatest career leap:
We had already established our practice when we finished grad school in 2009, but our greatest leap happened during the Great Recession. We were tired and cold from the grind in Boston and needed to figure out what was next. DK wound up heading to the bush in Nigeria to design and build a new city while Ryan and his future wife took advantage of the recession and moved to Honolulu, where they waited tables on the beach during the day and worked on design projects at night. It turned out to be the perfect way to find the space and freedom to build an experimental practice.

Greatest mentor:
Late Ghanaian architect Alero Olympio was a formative mentor. She was a radiant person and visionary architect, as well as incredibly modest and humble. She is effectively the godmother of sustainable architecture and design in Ghana. Not only did she champion local natural materials like laterite blocks, stone, and African hardwoods in buildings and furniture, she also recognized the critical need to protect Ghana and West Africa’s timber resources and forest ecosystems, contributing to the Ghana Forestry Commission replanting scheme. She designed the Kokrobitey Institute, pioneering sustainable housing projects, fitted out the Hotel Golden Tulip in Accra, Ghana, and designed the visitor trail and experience at Ghana’s Kakum National Park. She also put making at the center of her practice—both furniture and architectural design-build. Her business card said “Alero Olympio, Architect + Builder.” She was entrepreneurial and hands-on, and collaborated with countless people across continents, to advance an inclusive and integrative design-led development agenda in West Africa.

Low Design Office proposes leveraging the micro-enterprise kiosk culture in Ghana’s cities of Accra and Tema to kick-start the country’s stagnant building industry by promoting sustainable economic and ecological expansion. The firm highlights the use of structural bamboo as a potential strategy for “hacking” free trade areas occupied by kiosks.
Courtesy Low Design Office Low Design Office proposes leveraging the micro-enterprise kiosk culture in Ghana’s cities of Accra and Tema to kick-start the country’s stagnant building industry by promoting sustainable economic and ecological expansion. The firm highlights the use of structural bamboo as a potential strategy for “hacking” free trade areas occupied by kiosks.
Courtesy Low Design Office

The best advice you have ever gotten:
Find joy in the process; don’t always focus on the end result.

Design trend to revive:
Certain conventions exist today that distinguish between designed architecture—elements that are fixed in place—and mobile elements like furnishings (mobile elements), which are curated. There is also an alternate tradition of “total design,” in which everything is designed all at once, as intercoordinated ensemble. We subscribe more to the latter approach, in that we aim for an architecture of affordance, in which the building intermixes many functions together, and user-occupants often interface with the architecture at the human scale of furniture, designed as part of the building.

Design trend to leave behind:
Instagram-able moments. Architecture must go beyond creating beautiful images, which should result instead from successful space-making. The best spaces offer unexpected moments and new interaction, and ultimately challenge us to engage with life, environment, and each other in different ways.

For its MoMA PS1 finalist submission, Low Design Office proposed modular bamboo elements that range in size from architectural components to furniture in order to encourage “interspecies interaction with the city and one another.”
Courtesy Low Design Office For its MoMA PS1 finalist submission, Low Design Office proposed modular bamboo elements that range in size from architectural components to furniture in order to encourage “interspecies interaction with the city and one another.”
Courtesy Low Design Office

Memorable learning experience:
This year, we were MoMA PS1 Young Architect Program finalists. While we didn’t win, it was a very intense design process that reminded us of architecture school, culminating in an epic final 36 sleepless hours that included the destruction of our hotel lobby, paralysis of the mind, “finishing” our model 30 minutes after we were supposed to arrive at PS1, then somehow delivering what we think was a powerful presentation.

For our proposal, we opted to think about the biological future of design and architecture, considering how better interspecies cooperation can transform human society.

Favorite place to get inspired:
Vibrant city streets and open spaces in the wild

Located in Austin, Texas, the Garden Street House features an exposed framing system throughout intentionally undefined spaces.
Casey Dunn Located in Austin, Texas, the Garden Street House features an exposed framing system throughout intentionally undefined spaces.
Casey Dunn

This decade, architects should be discussing:
We are interested in biofabrication. This is what’s coming next. Utilizing living organisms and living systems as not only inputs, but also generators of material outputs—fabrication of materials using biological mechanisms. These kinds of material assemblies are not necessarily “natural” per se, but they result from natural processes.