LANZA ATELIER N H D M ARCHITECTS

Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo founded LANZA Atelier in 2015 for the express purpose of contributing to the beauty of the world. While that’s an admirable aspiration, it’s rare to see the B word used these days in architecture unless by a Neoclassicist. Contemporary architects tend to see beauty as being too subjective to claim, but Abascal has a simple definition for it: “Beauty is the opposite of inequality, cruelty, and injustice.”

Based in Mexico City, LANZA works on a wide range of typologies, from exhibitions and books to houses and public facilities, large and small. For Abascal and Arienzo, scale is less important than the strength of the idea and dedication to process—both partners teach and work on curatorial projects as well as build. “We think concepts don’t have scale,” Abascal told AN. “An idea can be tested at an object’s or a city’s scale.” “We think that everything is full of architecture,” Arienzo added. “Size doesn’t matter. The question is always, how do we start drawing them?”

Whatever the project, time is a central consideration for LANZA, inseparable from architecture itself. The duo conceive of their work as “contemporary space whose energy can last forever.” As such, the work itself strives for flexibility, designed with the notion that uses may and probably will change over time. “We like to think that we are designing a ruin,” they like to say. This focus on time is twinned with a strong sense of place. Local materials, whether industrial or artisanal, are preferred, with the goal of instilling their work with geographic identity.

While more than 25 collaborators have passed through LANZA’s office, the practice remains small and personal. It demands the trust of its clients and doesn’t work quickly, but rather slowly moves toward its final designs through multiple permutations. Abascal and Arienzo also monitor construction closely, modifying details throughout the process as site conditions and the facts of labor present themselves. “Architecture deals with time and needs time,” Abascal said.

It’s not a maxim that would fly very far with the hard-bitten capitalists north of the border, but at the same time LANZA has seen its own work mired in a time vortex that has transcended even its deliberate approach. Two of its large projects for Mexico City are stalled seemingly without end in the administrative labyrinths of the municipal bureaucracy. Faced with this, and feeling the pressure of the global environmental crisis bearing down upon them, Abascal and Arienzo now find themselves asking, “Do we still believe in the beauty of the world?” AS

It is hard to pinpoint a single defining typology for N H D M’s work. This variety is a testament to the interests and backgrounds of the firm’s founders, Nahyun Hwang and David Eugin Moon.

Moon, the son of immigrant parents, studied at the University of Michigan and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Hwang began her career in South Korea after studying architecture at Yonsei University. She came to the United States for graduate school (also at the GSD, where the duo met) and was “surprised” by the disciplinary compartmentalization. In South Korea, “urbanism, architecture, and larger territorial thinking was always one,” she explained to AN. This way of thinking is deeply integrated into N H D M’s ethos.

Before starting their own practice, Hwang and Moon designed for internationally renowned offices: Hwang for OMA, Herzog & de Meuron, and James Corner Field Operations, and Moon for Shigeru Ban and OMA, though the two didn’t overlap there. These roles were formative, as they were able to work on projects of varying scales worldwide.

“We joked that we spent maybe too long working in other offices before we founded our practice. But at the same time, that meant that we worked on many different types of projects,” Moon said.

Hwang and Moon’s first commission came over a decade ago while they were still working for other practices. They designed the Nam June Paik library, a small project in Yongin-si, South Korea that houses the archives of the Nam June Paik Art Center.

Among the practice’s current work is the Librería Barco de Papel. Located in New York City’s Jackson Heights neighborhood, the storefront is the last Spanishlanguage bookstore in the state. To improve the “accessibility and visibility” of the shop, garage-door windows will define the street-facing facade, alongside of which display tables, shelving, and seating will be brought out to the sidewalk. Furniture will be rearranged both inside and outside the shop to accommodate programming.

N H D M has worked on prototypes for housing, and redesigned parks. It previously presented work at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021 and will exhibit again this year.

Speculating about what projects are most intriguing, Hwang offered that the office is excited about “any project that gives us a way to explore new potentials in existing typologies.” She continued: “We’re interested in [the] public and collective realm, always. We’re also interested in private lives and domesticity and personhood and intimacy, and then how that relates to the collective realm and bigger pictures of the public.” KK