When we work together, we approach things very differently and we fight quite a lot, but whenever the project hits the right spot, both of us kind of acknowledge that and realize it. It's almost like in a puzzle when all the pieces kind of come together. That's when we both stop arguing and that's when you're like, okay, this feels right. Welcome to Arch of the next sessions one-to-one.
I'm Amelia Taylor-Hockberg and this week I'm speaking with the partners behind Family, Oannistonescu and Dong Ping Wong. Family's aesthetic has been described by the New York Times as emerging of pop culture and utilitarianism, and their practice has happily forged some non-traditional projects, such as a floating pool in New York's East River that filters the water around it and designing a 50-foot volcano for Kanye West's Yeeza store. Oannandong Ping discussed their early days collaborating at REX, what it takes to pitch their own projects, and how they've grown their practice. So Oannandong, great to have you on Arch of the next sessions one-to-one.
Thanks so much for joining us from New York, correct? You are in your New York office? Yes, we are. Thank you for having us.
Of course. Feeling a little bit closer to California. You're in LA-Lovial. Yes, we are based in Los Angeles, which usually means we're far away from the epicenter of the architectural action.
I didn't know that. I always assumed for ever that Arch of the second year in New York, I just was like, I'll never come across the country. Well, maybe we should just leave the mystery and have it be. Yes, we are also everywhere.
But so how long have you guys been settled in New York? I've been here since 2003, actually, but I'm from San Diego. So I did the whole first half of my life in California and then basically came here for grad school. So I've been here, I guess, now 13 years.
Yeah, we pretty much met in New York at our first job here 10 years ago, actually. It sounds really, really, really pretty. Almost, yeah, six more months. You're going to celebrate the anniversary.
Yeah, we actually are debating what to do. But yeah, so I lived on and off here for a while, and then I came back one, three years ago, four years ago, something like that, three years ago. And so the firm family, as it stands, is yourself and a few other partners. I was wondering from the beginning, because the firm started as a collaboration between the two of you, how did you grow the practice to include more people and take on more products?
So it's the only thing we have now. We have one eye kind of run the office and then we've got five people to work with us now. I think I'm trying to look out and see. Eight to five.
It's going to be a good way of course. Presumably because they're not all in the office with you, but they're. Well, no, just because literally this week we brought in a couple of people to help with the deadline. So I was kind of revising the count live.
Got it. But it's actually funny because one of the reasons, one I decided to work together is at Rex, the bosses saw it much sooner, much, much before we did, that we worked really well together, kind of off the bat. And so they would actually put us as a pair on different projects. Like we got moved around together all the time.
I think even one of the bosses, I don't know if you came up to you or me, but he came up to one I think and said you guys have to be a little careful because you're actually kind of intimidating or scaring a lot of the other people on the team because you guys basically talk so well with each other. But you always forget that you're supposed to be talking with a whole team of people, which is fair. Like we would just have this immediate kind of connection and show it's sort of impenetrable to a lot of other people. So that's actually been one of the things I think we are sometimes conscious of.
I'm not so conscious of it in the office that there's other people that are working with us and depending on us to be clear about what we're talking about. We got two secret twin language of sorts. Yeah, something like that. Well, we actually just got off an interview now and we have a few after.
And so I find it always so difficult actually to interview people. Don't want to have very different styles because the office is so small and everyone is such a big part of it that the fit has to be really right. And it's a rather flat office. So everyone has a right, not just has a right, but is expected to speak up and run with stuff and have probably more responsibility than in your typical big office.
So it's not always easy, but we have a really good team of people that we're really really really proud of. So it feels really awesome. And we'll say it changed dramatically. It is for me I don't offer download from.
Because in the beginning we did competitions and we did a lot of projects just on our own and or with friends. But the moment we started having actually boys and the team became bigger things changed dramatically in terms of their responsibility. One has to bear. Yeah, absolutely.
Hours, yeah. Yeah. Well, especially to refer to what you spoke of before is having this language between the two of you. How to bring in more people into that language that can still understand that language but maybe also make it accessible to a wider audience and as well as and simply do more work and make communication across those parties possible.
And I also realize I think slowly resonated. It's not always bad if we want to have to have our kind of like, like, we... I noticed like, for example, there'll be moments where I'll be in one of those going to walk out of the office and go for like a walk or go grab a coffee or something. And I think it's good that we sort of like have our secret language a little bit and then come back and you need your own space.
Everyone's like, someone's getting on. Getting on. I just want to leave you alone. I'll be over here with my book.
Well, I'm particularly interested in how smaller or at least initial partnerships that do work in the kind of you're describing where you pick up competitions, you do a lot of unsolicited stuff that you're kind of building this image and this kind of style that you want to be working with and representing of your firm. But then how to bring more people into that. And I'm wondering if you had from the outset the idea that this would grow to a certain size or is it just at this point you're going to keep it as big as you can, but are there dreams to make it even larger? Well, I think it's not about the size of the office itself but more about the kind of projects we want to do.
And actually, just now we got off an interview and we're both, oh, we wish we could hire quite a few of these people. But we're not necessarily quite there yet. But I think for us, well, we also have slightly different views here. We don't always was more interested in a bigger office, I think.
Versus I liked the intimacy of a small office. But at the end of the day, I think it just comes down to the ability of doing the projects that we of the scale that we really want to do. But we also learned, of course, that it's a growing process. Like you can just, you know, let's say even if you were to get a big project to just hire 50 people and then I expected to work magically, I think we're still in a learning process in terms of how we want the office to be around, how we wanted to feel and what we wanted to mean for everyone who's working here.
I think, you know, what I was saying is we, I think the kind of projects we like to do, A, oftentimes they're kind of civic, but they're also larger, say cultural projects, even housing projects. And they're the kind of projects that you typically see a team of anywhere from, let's say, eight to 15 people or something kind of throughout the different parts of the project. And it's actually the size of a project that one and I probably was comfortable with, basically based on our professional training. We were always on projects like that, like teams of 10 to 20 kind of things.
And at the moment, it's, you know, we have a lot of small projects, all super interesting, but each person is either individually on a project or maybe there's two or oftentimes two people around like three projects, you know, and because they're smaller, but also because our staff is small. In terms of the size of the office, like we were, we'd be very happy if we, the entire office was working on a large project. And it was just a 10 person office, for example, more conversely, you know, which is more, what you see in large offices, it's like 10 projects and there's 10 people on each project a much bigger office. But like, when I was saying, I think it's just the scale and almost impact of the kinds of projects that we like that sort of necessitate a larger team.
Then being said, though, I think we're, we also vary. There's no danger for that yet that, but getting over a certain size. And I know I am at least concerned and again, it's premature, but making sure that we stay on track and are able to produce the kind of work that we want to produce and not grow just for the sake of growing. I also wanted to ask, this might be a little bit, you probably get this all the time, but I'm on your website, currently, and I'm checking out other things on other tabs when I come back to the website, I don't think you see all these dogs on the website.
It's just dog. Is that a dog that is personal to either of you? Yeah, a parent, he's my dog. He's named after Perry Street.
Our office used to be on Perry Street in the West Village, which is a terrible reason to name anyone after that. He was in that office. He was actually quite present. He spent a lot of days and night with us in the office.
So he's very attached to everyone in the office. So he's a big part, actually, of the office culture in a way. And that comes through because he haunts the website. Yeah, our friends play live, they did the website.
And at first we did obviously didn't ask for it. So there was their kind of... First it was burrito. First it was burrito.
Yeah, first it was burritos, but the doctors from Sandy are gone very particular about burritos, and they totally use their own burrito. So, I have to ask, what is the wrong burrito? Because I'm from LA, so I have to ask, what is like Sandy goes wrong burrito? I think there's just had too much stuff in it.
That's a classic mistake. Yeah, which is fine. It wasn't a bad read of my name. I was like, I'm going to have a burrito.
And I see this by a particular burrito. And then they were like, but we also have Perry. Yeah, we're like, I'm perfect. We all look at it.
Well, it's very cute. It also really speaks to, or at least it reinforces the kind of mood of the site and the mood of the images that you guys kind of communicate yourselves through. And there's also something that I don't know if this has ever been, if you've ever heard this comparison before, but there is something in your projects that has a certain graphical similarity to your kangos group in that there's some of these, this is in no way a, this is a complete generalization. This is in no way like a comprehensive reading of your work, but it's simply that there's a lot of these projects like the Volcano and the Plus pool that have this immediacy in their graphical identity that they're just this, they can be understood very simply through an icon.
They're not necessarily, you know, shiny architectural iconic projects necessarily, but they have that legibility. I was wondering if that's something that you explicitly go for in your forms and in a way that you actually build the forms of your architecture. No. Wait.
Yeah, go ahead. Please elaborate. No, no, no. I think the one thing that we are very conscious of is, and we learned that early on with the pool is just how basically to make the project accessible to people.
With the pool specifically, we had to present, you know, the pool basically took off because people were really interested in it. That meant we kept talking about the pool to a bunch of people, but almost never to architect. So you had to talk to the city, you had to talk to the community, you had to talk to swimmers. So very different types of groups of people and not your usual kind of architecture crowd.
And I think that put us through a strong effort of, you know, just conveying what the project is about without any metaphor or kind of bullshit. But I think it's very blunt. I also think it's like intuitively often times it's kind of less strategic than that. We usually just, but I personally just like projects that read very simply and you kind of understand the basics of it right away.
Like in the same way, I think I really appreciate VR because we're for the same reason and a lot of my favorite projects, even if they don't look like a specific object or anything, you get the idea, the central idea really immediately from your architecture. I think there's always, and I think that's something we do deliberately actually try for in terms of that we want our architecture always to be clear and simple and actually welcoming and friendly and often times that leads to a form that's actually very, I guess contained in a sense, iconic, maybe. It's rare that we set out to do that, but definitely through the process of design, I do this one and I will start shaping the way of things that overcomplicate stuff or make a form kind of less clear and kind of try to bring it down to something more essential. When we started working, it was always very intuitive.
And you know, when you start up early on, you don't really have to necessarily articulate your work. Like obviously there was a bigger picture or a thought behind it, but you don't necessarily have to put it in words. So then we realized that we have this body of work that has a common trait, but it was very difficult for us to actually articulate. We tried to do it on the website, but in a way when we work together, we approach things very differently and we fight quite a lot.
But whenever the project hits the right spot, both of us kind of acknowledge that and realize that it's almost like in a puzzle when all the pieces kind of come together. That's when we both stop arguing and that's when you're like, okay, this video is right. And usually that's tied to the simplicity of the project. I think usually when it feels edited down enough, then it starts making sense.
That's what we both feel like, okay, this seems right. I think sometimes our least favorite architecture, whether it's coming from us or whether we see it on the street or something, is that kind of work that almost overfills your brain with stuff? I don't know how to explain it. Like there's something about the kind of work that really feels more like a ref or like an ease of something.
Often times it's our favorite kind of work that we arrive at or see. And I don't know if that's just because we're stressed all the time. We like seeing things as sort of, you know, it's like, I always say like my idea was for... I have a dog.
Like my idea was for architecture to feel like you're at the beach kind of thing. Like you want that kind of moment of simplicity, but also kind of clarity and ease in a lot of ways. And I think that ties well with having a kind of simple or direct form sometimes. You also spoke in particular in regards to the Plussel Bull project about speaking with a lot of non-architects to inform the process of designing and the pre-representation of the project.
Do you regularly work with other non-architectural or non-architect collaborators? We do. Definitely not at the level that we do on Plussel Bull. I mean, that's a very particular project.
I mean, very exciting that way. But we do. I mean, even beyond it's obviously like most of our clients are not architects obviously. But a lot of the projects will have a world of people that are coming from non-architectural backgrounds.
Oftentimes they are kind of creatively based, whether it's fashion or design or music or something like that. But we do work with a lot of non-architectural design. We prefer to actually. Yeah.
I don't think we necessarily set out for that, but I think it just have an organic illness. It's also just not something that's more interesting for us. Just because we've been in an architectural world long enough, you know, punch for people. It's more interesting I think about what other people are doing.
But even on a simple profession not ever we are. I think just because we're still learning how to run an office. And what that means, we are trying to see how other creative businesses are doing it and just trying to learn from that, whether it's about the structure of or just maintaining a creative level and a certain output and all of that. So we're trying to learn from other businesses or professionals.
Professionally as an industry architecture, so we're not particularly inspiring. Interesting. Well, could you elaborate a little bit on that? Because I think a lot of people in the profession feel there is a bit of an identity crisis at hand.
So what exactly makes you feel like maybe the community isn't the most inspiring place to look? Well, it's coming. I don't want to put it out there. It's a community.
I think actually there's a lot of amazing people. I think it's there's something about the structure of the profession at the moment. And I mean, maybe not even a small, but just a classical professional profession that you'll see other creative industries just leapfrogging and innovating a lot more and being much more flexible and a lot more fluid. And art literature, I think partially because of just what art literature is, it's buildings that you have to deal with with code with life safety with hazards with actually very complicated and real world things.
So you don't want it to be too quite a fancy in that way. But at the same time, you know, you don't see you don't see a lot of let's say young innovation coming through architecture at a real level, maybe an academic level. You're talking about the ark and like he's one of the few firms and people that I feel like globally is really making impact at a relatively young age at a significant level. And it's such a rare thing.
If you look at almost every other creative industry, there's just so much more kind of transformation constantly. And it's a big reason why we even started the pool product in the first place was us as a young office, especially back then and certainly even now and probably for the next two years, like we're not going to get, you don't you can't sit there and wait for a client to offer you something like that. I think art literature is funny that it's somewhere becoming the service industry, but also in a way you're putting out a product. So it's this weird thing where you're waiting for someone to offer you a chance to put out an ideal product as opposed to say a product industry like a fashion industry or an industrial industry, you just put out a product.
And if it sells or not, that's where the success comes from. You can't really do that as much as an art tech, because obviously putting out a product at $100 million is hard to do. But that's kind of the ideal at the core of it, why of the possible anyway, and how we'd like to see the industry moving in some level. Can you actually put out a design and then have all the other stuff, all the funding, all the code, all the client-based, all the politics that would be driven by the design or by the thing you put out?
Yeah, so it's a weird one with architecture, because I'm not saying or we're not necessarily saying that speed is better, but in architecture also, just the amount of time that you need for a project had to get something actually built. Like by the time you design it, I remember back in the day without growing up those were the most exciting, they were at their peak and you would see them win the competitions, but by the time the building was already built, you kind of the architecture world was almost already over, if that makes sense, you know what I mean? There's this discrepancy between the ideas and the extra built stuff. But then there's also the case of like, I mean, there's just so much bad architecture.
Like, you're not, I'm not talking about the only earth talks, like that's, if everything was only. But I mean, you look around the city and it's what one out of 100 buildings looks like they were designed by an architect or actually New York is probably an exception. Like there's only if you look anywhere else in the US, like, where one of the projects. No, I'm just saying like, there's much worse places as well.
Like where hopefully starting a project in San Diego, actually for a big, not a big, it's a 40 home housing development, like individual homes, it's basically a suburb, but it's a really interesting premise and a really interesting brief. But, and it's the client has a huge environmental agenda, which is why he found us and why we were excited about it. But immediately we're like, why, you know, the kind of classic suburb you see across the US, that's more or less where I grew up. It's probably where at least half the nation is not more lives in.
Why does it seem like the whole entire architecture profession that we know anyway just sort of ignores it? It's not really on the radar of things that people want to change or do. And yet it's such a huge effect on how people live and grow up and know about architecture and understand space and have an effect with a house or relationship with a home. And it's always like where you look around like developers driven projects are really depressing.
And oftentimes like iconic architecture projects are really depressing. Is there something like, I don't know if it's a profession based or just I feel like there has to be something within the profession that is causing that to a certain degree. So my goal in life would be to find a different kind of less offensive standard for job ceilings. That would be so incredibly heavy if I or someone else has it.
I don't care, but you think someone please. That could lead your Wikipedia page until you. Yeah, it's so amazing to me how how standardized it is everywhere going. Every single office building you can think in this country and it's going to have a drop.
And if it was just office building, that would be amazing. But I think that in itself would make me so sorry. I think because it is so difficult to actually come up with an idea and then find support for it in architecture and use the direction using the other way, it is hard to affect change to these larger almost systemic projects like suburban developments or something like that. But the plus pool is also an interesting example because of its crowdfunding use of crowdfunding in the process of design.
So do you guys feel that crowdfunding is a viable form for architectural innovation or architectural practice? Sure answer is yes. A long answer is I have no idea as maybe long answer. No, but I think yes in principle, I don't know how it gets there quite yet because I don't think it's there yet.
Like for example, we're not doing purely crowdfunding anymore. We're doing crowdfunding. We're doing philanthropic. We're doing worse for capital our plan is to go after I think local and city and state funding for capital construction.
So it's a kind of combination of different types of funding. What I will say is without Kickstarter or without crowdfunding and in a larger extent, some's dumb but without the internet, we would not have been able to do plus pool period. We wouldn't have been able to do it certainly in the way we're doing it 10 years ago. I was going to say is there a different way we can just say crowd support?
And the funding definitely helped us, especially it helped to kick start actually. The project like the first cast and the amount of time we put in the beginning wouldn't have been possible without the funding for sure. But the capital cost isn't coming from crowdfunding and anything it has. But the project wouldn't be anywhere it is today if it wasn't for our support that we actually got from people.
If you get a quarter million dollars from crowdfunding, you have a quarter million dollars more leverage than you did before, whether it's political or getting more funding or social anything like that. And I said that also it seems like crowdfunding for all sorts of other things doesn't really show any signs of slowing down. And it actually slowly seems like it's becoming more commonplace and just more part of the economics of how things get made. Let me kick start at what surpassed NEA a few years ago in terms of amount it raised for the arts in the country, which is pretty insane.
And so I feel like inevitably you'll see a crowdfunding building. And I think depending on what that scale may be, I don't necessarily think it's a yes kind of down the road. What the mechanics are being at the moment I'm not really sure yet. But the most important part I feel in the whole process is that people become aware of their environment or they feel they have a right to say something about the environment the same way they don't get started with products right there.
Like oh I like this I want it I believe in it. So I'm gonna pay for it. In a similar way I think with some of these crowdfunding projects people feel like oh I you know this would really make my neighborhood better. This would make my city better.
This would make a difference in how I raise my child here etc. Or just change the effect of quality of life. And I think that in an ideal scenario for me the fact that people would be become more involved and aware of their environment and feel they have a right to have a say, an active say in that and effect of environment in which you live in which they would be the biggest kind of benefit. Because money if you have people support and education or if there's a real interest and or need for something you can find the money.
But it's really most important that you can make the difference at a quality of life. I think actually one of the most interesting things about kicksters are part of it but also just neither way that's kind of like social media agent and communicating with people is architects are either forced to or not have an opportunity to actually talk to people at a much earlier stage in a project than they did before. And architects I think are notoriously very bad at that. Like they're very bad I think communicating ideas on a public level are clearly or in a level that makes any relevance sense to anybody besides architects or their client.
Maybe not even their client. So I think that I feel like we'll definitely see a change in how what the role of the architect is and how how communicative your tech needs to be. I think it's huge. I think architects always want to be kind of part of that civil conversation.
Now there's ways to be that. At the time I think that was the largest crowd-funded public project. Civic project. I'm sure that probably must have changed me now.
But that's I think that kind of ties into why certain things on Kickstarter can work so well and can also pass any funding is that you have these this item that is not at all self-contained by nature of the fact that it filters water but like it is a it is an image that people understand is accessible it seems as if it's almost like a product. And I think that if anything like the public awareness that comes or at least the virality or whatever that comes out of sharing something through a platform like Kickstarter could be leveraged by other publicly funded projects. I mean that would be maybe a way to kind of have the cake needed to. But I think that a lot of these projects would otherwise perhaps find a different forum for discussion and for sharing and that would be architectural exhibitions.
We had a really super popular exhibition in Los Angeles a couple of years ago called the Never Builds LA exhibition which collected a bunch of projects from early 20th century to 20th century Los Angeles a few also a bit later of all these projects very pie in the sky amazing very drastic often projects that were of course never actually realized but often the reasoning wasn't always the same. Sometimes it was just you know this is too crazy of a project or the funding fell out or something like that. But for you in particular and imagining something like the plus pool as a historical context if the internet weren't the platform that it is would you have brought this to an architectural exhibition platform to try to get it out is there a do you feel that there's a value in that kind of setting? Yes that's not a word.
I don't know either. I think in my well I think we're always aware that the project wouldn't be where it is today or possible without it having happened at the time in at a specific moment in time and in this place like in New York specifically just because of the large amount of New York-centric media and because New Yorkers just like to talk about themselves. But then being said I don't know if we necessarily would have brought it to probably I mean if that would have been the only way to put it out there maybe but I also wouldn't have expected to ever get any feedback from that. Well I think part of it is also and this is maybe my own problem is thinking about exhibitions oftentimes I think about it more like this one.
Does GoToDye? No it's like you know it's an exhibition of an archive of some kind it's an exhibition of something that happened not using it as a thing to basically promote or start an idea you know what I mean? Yeah that often exhibitions are in some ways have a casualty of the long game as well and that they're often retrospect. We're looking at analyzing an historical period.
Right and it might be us in mind but like I could have I we might have gone maybe we create like a showroom for it which is basically an exhibition about the project but something like just even that maybe you're just changing what the point of that use of that gallery space would be just not just showing the project the point is it actually like sell the project based on a some level. I'll engage the public. I will say with the course specifically it wasn't necessarily architecture magazines or blogs or whatever picking it up but first and foremost it was just like New York-centric media and we also learned the value of reaching out what it was because at the end of the day by presenting I think the discourse within the profession is super important but I think at the end of the day just talking to other architects or just referencing the architecture what only gets you so far. You're not actually you know gonna get necessary projects out of there but also it wouldn't necessarily have launched the project versus you talk to communities or politicians or people who have a vested interest in that project happening in their courtyard.
I think that's what in a way can sometimes it's basically sorry I think the larger the bigger the audience the better and I think the more limited to a certain to a certain spectrum I think the yeah if there was a way to do an exhibition or maybe another way to look at this if we didn't have internet I think we would have tried to look at some form of medium whether it's exhibition or postcard or newspaper or something that was broad and certainly was not based on our technical and that's something really strictly our technical. Actually something that very few people know is when we did so when we had the idea of the pool we got together with Play Labs, Archie and Jeff were friends of ours so they're a graphic design company and we engaged their hub to put together a website and we also did a poster of the pool which is my favorite graphic probably and a hard copy and copy print book. Yeah and a print book a very small one and on the back of the print book we said we are looking for engineers you know like one engineer like filter guys like it was a whole of disciplines that have them don't really exist we just didn't know what we were looking for. Yeah so we did actually mail so we turned out to the digital point was in parallel to the digital campaign although it was hardly a campaign.
We also mailed out quite a few hard copies of these books and posters to I guess mostly engineering companies and universities and things like that. I don't know if we ever heard back from any of them. No one of the first people we talked to was Josh. We sent one to the Highline and I think actually Highline was the first person to call because of the book.
I mean sorry they went first and called they called the first part of the book and what I remember it is the reason they said it was because the book itself was designed really nicely and the envelope was written really nicely. Like I think I was something really silly like I'd underlined the name Highline or something. I really like the underline. I was like that was complete chance but it was funny because it was actually the first time we never met Josh and Josh David who was one of the two founders of the Highline who was now on our board but that was you know early days like within the first month of the pool project.
Met him. He was super nice but his main takeaway was this will take you 10 years guys make sure you're committed make sure you want to do this and that was it and of course Archie and I left while he was these old people who are doing my three and of course now we're on six and it's really a ten year project and but it's amazing that it came full circle where Josh is part of it now. So I have to ask as well about Kanye as a client and I'm sure you guys of course feel these questions like too many times you count but what I'm interested in particularly is having a client at such a stature what effect that can have on your firm and just on your feeling of who you are in the field. Did having Kanye as a client make a major difference in how you actually ran your practice?
Just in question. I don't know how we ran our practice. Or how you catered the project to that client? No not on that level.
I think if on any level the influence is more on the sense that it's kind of what we learned from him in the sense that the way he works on music he's a very collaborative character obviously and the way he works on music bringing all these different people together he works similarly on every other aspect like working on something like the stage it's about the music coming together with the set design coming together with the choreography with everything and I think that that kind of mixed media or like just general collaboration between people is something that we always thought was interesting and we were exposed to him and we definitely learned a lot like that so I think that there was definitely an exchange and a learning process there but I think it probably a different way than intro expected. I think it definitely opened us up to a lot more stuff than we would have been exposed to obviously without some of my Kanye especially on the kind of material level and just kind of quality level in a lot of ways in terms of material and space and stuff and the other thing I think I noticed it did in terms of how we work is actually sped us up or at least it made us less precious about let's say crafting a kind of perfectly crafted deliverable to send to a client and it doesn't work with every collaborative we work with every client we work with but there's a few Kanye included for a good friends with Kanye who's the owner of Offway the Brandon Hong Kong legal to store for. They're very like they're always in a hundred things at once they're very loose and I don't know if that's what they were but they're able to kind of process a billion things so it does not work to say like okay we're gonna see you in a month let's sit down for a four-hour meeting by that point they're already onto something you're already onto like 10 other things so it's actually we've started working in a way that we really just produced an idea and said it over and it's very kind of fluid and it's actually really nice. But that's mostly because we're talking about very very very very particular case in which it's more of a collaboration it's not like you go present the radio like great you know that that that was you know without point it is all about collaborating and discussing ideas and pushing them further.
So I mean even when we talk to like when we work with the office like we've gotten less reliant on I think formal presentation. Yeah. Just nice. Like we can we can it's like a screen grab it and let's look at it like don't worry about making a really pretty thing which talk about the idea before we worry about what the refined version is and that's actually really nice.
So this is a question we'd like to ask our guests just as kind of a way to continually branch out about the community and the media that influences the community of architecture but are you guys reading or listening to or watching anything right now that you want to share? Architecture related? Anything related? Okay good thank god.
I do read a lot and for me reading is something quite important but it always changes now I'm reading under our life is elsewhere that's my subway book and then on my of night table I have like three books that are constant, constant rotation. One is second sex by Simone de Beauvoir I'm probably halfway through and then there's a Eugene UNESCO which is a Romanian playwright who lived in Paris the right now sir I think those are the two that are kind of selling ring on the night table right now listening I don't know it's always changing I've been listening to a lot of old by all them in 90s music. I don't know if it's like yeah like happens you know Nirvana, Gansner roses things like that well also even like 70s or like I don't know in general just stuff that probably says a lot but yeah that's probably it pretty much. Don't look very desperate I can say what he's watching he's watching Zane Reynold's surf videos he's watching a lot of Arsenal games if you want to call those games it's not a game.
Yeah I was gonna say I'm gonna sound like an idiot after I wanted a list of fancy sounding books which I have none of yeah so one is Dan Reynold's was a surfer and he has a site called Marine Layer Productions so I think it might be kind of defunct anyway he just posts surf video clips but they usually it wasn't nice they're usually much less like and much more raw and actually much kind of simpler and shorter than your sort of surf video that was coming out quality. Are you a surfer? Yes but honestly probably more was I grew up surfing in California in New York I surf very rarely much more rare than I would hope so I cling on to whatever small pieces I can cling on to. He said with a said voice.
That voice. That voice. That's my biggest or grand of ever getting an architecture. Why is that?
Why is that? Why is that? Why is that? Why is that?
Why is that? Why is that? He used to also drum he was okay theta. Oh wow.
Never too late. Never too late. It's never too late. Combine all those three things.
Otherwise I've been pretty like I'm always constantly amazed by last week tonight at John Oliver's show. Like I just watched all that was like over again. It's like it's gonna be so fun to work for that show and to be like a research on that show. I always think one of the best jobs for those type of both satirical or also real like John Oliver's show for those types of new shows is to be simply a graphical artist who gets to create all the wacky collages and they use to put together either fake or real news.
Because they're always so spot on and it's funny because like you know we'll try to sometimes do like graphic diagrams or collage or something in the office to explain an idea that never really works and you always see like on the shows they're just so perfect. Well I think you found your next collaborator. Yeah it's true. I have a good friend actually that we met back in the Rex days and he's studying art at Rutgers.
I think he's in a painting program I'm gonna say but anyway one of their assignments for a sculpture class was to do a comedy stand-up and I love that. It was I'm still such you know like they literally went to the club. Yeah like they had to sign up for legit clubs in New York and actually go on the stage and actually do that and I thought that's so awesome to do that. Sorry I don't know how we ended up here.
No but that's after that any type of sculpture crit is probably the least terrifying thing you've ever been to. That sounds like a big deal breaker for a lot of people in that practice. You might have gotten into it so not have to ever speak to anyone again. Well thank you both so much for talking with me today.
This was really great to learn a little bit more about the firm and hear both of your perspectives so thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. Thanks for having us. Thanks for listening to our Connect Sessions one-to-one with Juanist and Etscu and Dong Ping Wang of Family. Donnie LoVoyna edits the podcast and Matt Scalinges composed our music.
Myself and Poppitruna are the producers of one-to-one. New episodes come on every Monday. Make sure to not miss an episode by subscribing to us on iTunes and if you like the podcast please consider leaving us a review. You can keep up with podcasting news from our Connect on Twitter through at our accessions or hashtag our Connect Sessions or you can email us through connect at arkonex.com.
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