LTL lecture at MIT

My frustration of not having a job was temporarily alleviated during Marc's Lecture at MIT tonight. Most of the projects he showed were included in LTL's last monologue "Opportunistic Architecture", a term that can be viewed negatively as being lazy, but in LTL's practice, the title is an accurate representation of it attitude: let the constraints become catalytic generator for creative invention and non-conventional strategies.

Besides having a black belt in Karate, Marc is an eloquent speaker and a pencil drawing master. The firm's signature presentation style of sectional perspective produced by pencil drawings and tonal overlays aids LTL's clear design logic, and subsequently influence the manifested forms. You don't see almost any non-rectilinear projects from LTL, thanks to the drawing styles they adopts.

Ceiling plan is usually neglected in conventional design process. In the cases of small retail interior designs in Manhattan, ceiling plan could become an opportunity. This is apparent in both "Fluff Bakery" and "Tides", where aggregation and reconfiguration of felt strip and bamboo skewers not only create striking visual sensations but also acts as performative systems combining with lighting and acoustics.

I was amazed to see many of the projects in their book is actually being realized, including the Arthuose, an amazing renovation/adaptive reuse of an existing structure in Austin, as well as MSK installation for the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Arthouse under construction at an earlier time.

MSK being test-installed for one day

Now that this wonderful lecture is in past-tense, I am going back to the endless and hopeless job search. Though there is one thing this lecture reminded me. That is the pursuit of intelligent designs, with a different attitude from the ocean of so-called "architecture practices" out there, is what we have believed in and what we should keep striving for.