Lecture Series: Leslie Lok & Sasa Zivkovic, HANNAH

Unlogging: New Material Narratives for Timber Construction

Wednesday, November 9 at 5:30pm. Design Building, 170.

HANNAH is an experimental design and research studio that works across scales, from furniture to buildings to urbanism. Founded by Leslie Lok and Sasa Zivkovic in 2014, the office has a keen interest in architectural explorations grounded in material expression, digital fabrication, and construction. The studio’s work aims to mine the tension between machine means and architectural ends. From the ground up, digital design and fabrication technologies are intrinsic to the making of HANNAH’s work, facilitating fundamentally new material methods, tectonic articulations, environmental practices, technological affordances, and forms of construction. HANNAH’s recent work includes the 3D-printed RRRolling Stones furniture at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York; A New Robotic Brutalism—Additive Architectural Elements, a solo exhibition at Pinkcomma Gallery in Boston; Ashen Cabin, a robotically fabricated building in Ithaca, New York; and Unlog, an installation for the Biomaterials Building Exposition at the University of Virginia.

HANNAH is the recipient of the 2020 Architectural League Prize, was named one of Architect Magazine’s Next Progressives in 2018 and won ArchDaily’s Best New Practice Award in 2021. The studio’s work has been published in Architectural Record, Architect Magazine, Log, the New York Times, Dwell, and Dezeen, among others, and was exhibited internationally. Lok’s and Zivkovic’s academic research has been widely published in book chapters and at peer-reviewed conferences.

Lok and Zivkovic are assistant professors of architecture at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP). Lok directs the Rural-Urban Building Innovation (RUBI) Laboratory, which investigates new building methods that couple digital construction technologies with natural and non-standardized material for the design of adaptable buildings and housing in rural-urban contexts. Zivkovic directs the Robotic Construction Laboratory (RCL), a research group that focuses on the development of sustainable robotic construction technologies to advance the future built environment.