The Los Angeles Design Group, LLC (The LADG) is a firm specializing in contemporary design at all scales. We have particular expertise in a materialist approach to design problems, exploiting the properties of pragmatic building materials to create environments and objects that are tailored to generate a specific sensory experience. Often, this approach utilizes advanced digital modeling software and machine fabrication to drive down costs and allow the emergence of rich textures, complex form, and refined detailing at the scale of human interaction. This narrow focus has produced a diverse array of executed projects, including multi-family residential buildings, retail interiors, tenant improvement packages, single-family residential buildings, interior renovations, graphic design and industrial design. Established in 2004, the firm has completed projects in California, Hawaii, Oregon, Colorado, New York and the UK.

We are a business committed to buildable, pragmatic architecture with the aid of a professional staff and sustainable balance sheet. We are also a design collective committed to advancing the state of architectural discourse through research, provocation, and novelty.

Our built work depends directly on our speculative, research-based projects. Speculative work is the laboratory which allows us to discover new solutions to design problems that can later be selectively borrowed and applied to commercial projects. The relationship between the two is analogous the relationship between concept cars and mass-production vehicles. The more radical design proposals of our speculative work inform our built work as innovations in structure, materials, form, program, and aesthetics.  Our clients take advantage of forward-thinking design strategies without incurring the risks of experimentation.  Our goal is not to produce innovation for its own sake, but to relentlessly question the fundamental assumptions of design and construction in order to find a solution that satisfies the specific demands of each project.

For our commercial clients, the portfolio demonstrates our design responses to practical building problems, long-term planning requirements, and issues of corporate branding and strategy. With any luck, these design responses will exhibit moments of beauty and visual sophistication. There are also moments in the portfolio, however, where our work is not easily identifiable as a conventional building type such as a house, office space, or retail interior. It may be difficult to identify some of the projects as architecture at all: the images may suggest something untoward if not outright weird, and the explanatory notes to a project will seem obtuse and inaccessible. This is as it should be. Despite the recent spate of reality television programs that encourage the novice to think that anyone can “build their vision” with a sufficient supply of hot glue and 2x4’s, architecture is an exclusive discipline with a body of research that is sometimes intended only for other architects.

For our academic audience, the portfolio may seem too loaded with projects that can be easily dismissed as conventional. That is also as it should be. For us, the radical, if it has any hope of situating itself in the world and disturbing the conventional order of the discipline, must emerge from a relentless exploration of real, built work.  The projects on display here are motivated by a research agenda, albeit one that has been happily invaded by the errata of construction loans, general contractors, insurance policies, real estate agents, building codes, city council members, neighbors, and clients’ parents. This invasion is not an excuse; it is the optimism that our firm is finding an alternate path to the avant-garde.  The analogy of concept and mass production vehicles is actually a fluid exchange of information as built and speculative projects freely influence and transform one another. Ours is a process of working into the radical as the work finds an aesthetic footing, organizes a commercial audience, and slowly alters the landscape of architectural desires and requirements.