Ada Tolla has a Master’s degree in Architecture and Urban Design from the Universita’ di Napoli, Italy, and completed postgraduate studies at Columbia University, New York. Besides heading her professional practice, LOT-EK, she currently teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Architecture. She also lectures at major universities and cultural institutions globally.
Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano have achieved high visibility for their sustainable and innovative approach to construction, materials, and space and through the adaptive reuse (“upcycling”) of existing industrial objects and systems not originally intended for architecture. They are also recognized for the use of technology as an integral part of architecture, for addressing transformability in architecture, and for integrating aspects of art and architecture.
LOT-EK’s work has been published in national and international publications, including the New York Times, the London Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, Wallpaper*, Domus, A+U, Interior Design, Wired, Surface, Metropolis, Graphis, and more.
LOT-EK’s first monograph, Urban Scan, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2002. Mixer: Installation and Assembly Manual: LOT-EK Architecture was released by by Edizioni Press in 2000; and LOT-EK: Mobile Dwelling Unit was published by DAP in 2003.
Ada Tolla was recently recognized as a United States Artists (USA) Booth Fellow of Architecture and Design. Nominations are made each year by U.S. arts leaders and practitioners, critics, and scholars, of artists they believe show an extraordinary commitment to their craft.
Announcements
If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture by Moshe Safdie
If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture
By Moshe Safdie
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
Published: September 2022
One of the world’s greatest and most thoughtful architects recounts his extraordinary career and the iconic structures he has built—from Habitat in Montreal to Marina Bay Sands in Singapore—and offers a manifesto for the role architecture should play in society.
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Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future
By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022
Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.
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Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People
By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022
Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.
Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York by Steven Heller
Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York
By Steven Heller
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: October 2022
An entertaining coming-of-age memoir from Steven Heller, award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times, that takes readers on a visually inspired look back at being at the center of New York’s youth culture in the 1960s and ’70s.
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022
Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”
Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman
Women Holding Things
By Maira Kalman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: October 2022
In the spring of 2021, Maira and Alex Kalman created a small, limited-edition booklet, “Women Holding Things,” which featured select recent paintings by Maira, accompanied by her insightful and deeply personal commentary. The booklet quickly sold out. Now, the Kalmans have expanded that original publication into an extraordinary visual compendium. We see a woman hold a book, hold shears, hold children, hold a grudge, hold up, hold her own. In visually telling their stories, Kalman lays bare the essence of women’s lives—their tenacity, courage, vulnerability, hope, and pain.
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