Ada Tolla

Architect / Italy; United States / LOT-EK

Ada Tolla’s Book List

The founding partners of LOT-EK, Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, have provided a joint list of books that have influenced their work as architects, educators, thinkers, and people of the world.  It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows Tolla and Lignano that there were two distinct reactions as they were deciding on which books to include: passionate accord or sharp disagreement. There is no middle ground about what resonates with LOT-EK.  As with the work they produce, or the projects they decide to pursue, things either resonate, or they simply do not.

The following titles reflect the attitudes, desires, and subject matter that inform the minds of LOT-EK.

2 books
Cesare Brandi

This book vividly reveals how to conceive and manifest visionary spatial concepts by pushing geometries to obsessively abstract extremes. It has significantly influenced our work—especially as of late, as we strive to generate skewed geometries with very elementary objects.

Henry Petroski

To discover, experiment, and invent. This is all we (LOT-EK) do and it really is the only way to evolve.  And it is full of unpredictable risk and actual failure—no matter how “scientifically” we try to anticipate the outcomes (as this book argues). Our evolution accelerates in leaps where so much risk is involved and we simply love it.

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