Oyler Wu Collaborative

OFFICE PROFILE

2009

The architecture office of Oyler Wu Collaborative was established in 2001 in New York, and is currently located in Los Angeles, CA. The two partners, Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, both received their Masters of Architecture degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. They have both worked as project managers for renowned offices in New York including Toshiko Mori Architect, Lebbeus Woods, Architecture Research Office, and Gluckman Mayner Architects prior to starting their own practice. Their current work includes projects of a wide range of types and sizes, ranging from gallery installations to a 23-story mixed use tower. With projects located in Los Angeles, Taipei, Taiwan, and Ordos, Inner Mongolia, they have been widely published globally for their experimental design aesthetics. Both partners are professors of architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Oyler Wu Collaborative was recently awarded the design of the new space for the LA Forum for Art and Architecture in Hollywood. Their first book, Pendulum Plane, was published in July through RAM Publications.

OPERATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

We believe that our greatest obligation as architects is not only in the ideas we put forth, but in our ability to assertively test them, understand their application, and to constantly evolve as a result of that understanding. Our practice thrives on the utilization of diverse methodologies that range from new design and fabrication technologies to material and structural experimentation. We believe that architecture should operate at every scale, through a sensibility that is equally engaging at the scale of a site as it is at the smallest of details. The range of scales represented in our work as well as our constant attention to materials and details is indicative of that fundamental belief.

Eager to test our ideas, and impatient in our desire to see the effects of our work, our office has turned to our own love of building to transform small projects with modest budgets into a testing ground for our ideas. Like most young offices, our clients are rich in ambition, but lacking in financial means. In the case of all of our built projects to this point, our office has been responsible for the construction of the work. The lack of conventional separation between the architectural and construction fields has allowed us to use the construction phase as an extension to the design process. It has also provided a more direct translation of ideas from digital form to reality, while ensuring a level of articulation often difficult to achieve through a more conventional means of construction. It has been a period of material discovery, invention, and experimentation that comes only through the difficult, but profoundly rewarding task of realizing the work on a given site. Most importantly, it has provided us with a new way of understanding what it means for an architectural intervention to exist in this world, and at a time that still allows us to recognize, respond, and reconsider the work.