The LADG
(The Los Angeles Design Group) designs new buildings for new kinds of families, gatherings, and uses. Like our namesake city, we take seriously the creative potential of the casual, the physical, and even the ad hoc - making use of familiar things in unexpected ways... more︎
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Assembly: Construction, Empathy, and the Light-Framed Box
Andrew Holder and Claus Benjamin Freyinger. "Assembly: Construction, Empathy, and the Light-Framed Box." In Assembly: Matter, Lineament, and Aggregated Systems in Architectural Production. Gail Peter Borden and Michael Meredith, Eds. London: Routledge, 2025.
"From a constant vantage of a corner in the rear yard, we made a habit of photographing our House 5 every few days while it was being built in the middle part of 2020. Looking back at this ad hoc filmstrip years later, we could see two kinds of construction underway. The first kind of construction to appear on the scene of these pictures is material and literal. One can literally see construction materials moving across the city, arriving on site, and being assimilated into the emerging structure..."
...in the second register of construction, there is a second variety of object – one not literal but rather imaginary. The topmost part of the roof in House 5, for instance, is a gigantic box, like an overturned cardboard container rendered in standing-seam metal, opened, with flaps extended to cover things underneath.
While this second, imaginary order of construction “adds up” to the same building form, it does so on different terms. Instead of being built from the ground up in small units, this second construction works according to the logic of a carboard box. Parts are collected together and held in position not by nails or bolts, but by the faces of the box as they hinge and fold down. And although the house is mobile in this sense – a form made by the movement of a box – it is not arbitrary. The box enforces a system of measure by the ways in which it can and cannot move. These limits are not quantitative, but rather felt into by intellection.
Assembly is the word which best describes this double register of construction. It is the crossing of literal construction with a kind of empathy that is both enabled and disciplined by a common object like the box."