LTL Architects

Established 1997; based in New York
Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, and David J. Lewis, founders and principals

In a decade of practice, LTL Architects (formerly Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis) has assembled a diverse body of work that includes built projects, installations, and speculations that consistently pose the question, “What if . . . ?” LTL describes its work as “opportunistic architecture,” by which they mean an approach in which such constraints as budget, schedule, zoning, and site are viewed as opportunities to explore overlaps between space, program, form, budget, and materials that generate imaginative solutions. The scale and range of the firm’s projects vary from large institutional buildings, such as a residence hall at the College of Wooster, to a light fixture commissioned by Ivalo Lighting Incorporated and a wall-covering collection for Knoll Textiles. A key element in the success, surprise, and pleasure of LTL’s work is its inventive use of materials, particularly in smaller projects: a wall relief of cast-plaster coffee cups at a coffee shop, for example, or walls and ceiling composed of industrial felt in a restaurant. The irm’s probing intellect is in equal evidence in its speculations, which, in addition to New Suburbanism, include the re-imagining of a typical parking garage as a “driveup skyscraper” that combines parking with a mix of other uses. Academia provides important intellectual fuel for LTL, and all three partners teach at universities in the New York region. The irm was one of six that represented the United States at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2004, and it received the National Design Award for Interior Architecture from Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in 2007. Opportunistic Architecture, LTL’s first monograph, was published in 2007.