In this lecture Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood will present the built work of First Office as a working process. The title, Working Buildings, borrows its form from the more common expression “working models.” While working models tend to be tentative and temporary, built work is often presented as definitive and final. But in an early stage of a young practice, the distinction between the two is often difficult to draw. Built work can appear vulnerable, hesitant, even questionable.
The presentation will address models that grow to the scale of buildings and buildings that remain unfinished or uncertain even in their completed state. Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood are founders of First Office in downtown Los Angeles. Built projects include a collaboration on the Pinterest office headquarters in San Francisco, a temporary screening room at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, and some small houses. Their texts have been published widely, in Log, Perspecta, Project, and Future Anterior, and have been compiled in a Graham Foundation book Nine Essays, published with Treatise Press in 2015. That same year, First Office received the Architect’s Newspaper’s Best of Young Architects prize and became a finalist in MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program.
