LOT-EK: Objects + Operations [Hardcover]

LOT-EK is a design practice that believes in being unoriginal, ugly, and cheap. Also in being revolutionary, gorgeous, and completely luxurious. LOT-EK’s work reveals extraordinary transformations of ordinary things—from their famous shipping container projects onward—combining maker culture and hacker culture into beautiful and radical visions for sustainable and meaningful living.LOT-EK: Objects + Operationssurveys dozens of projects—built, unbuilt and in-progress; polemical, practical, and in-between—complemented by photographs from LOT-EK’s multi-year URBAN SCAN project, a vast photographic document of infrastructure and incident, as well as essays by Thomas de Monchaux and interviews with founding partners Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano. LOT-EK founders Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano show a commitment to the industrial nonaesthetic with this book-as-manifesto. The bold type, brash color, and black-and-white photos underscore their partnership as 'a design practice that believes in being unoriginal, ugly, and cheap.'
—Architectural Record

The book itself is visually compelling... It closely examines a variety of 21st-century projects, with each example featured on the left-hand page and a detailed photo from their URBANSCAN project on the right-hand page. The result is a book that moves seamlessly between a macro and micro view of their design philosophy as it applies to transforming discarded materials into functional properties.
—Dwell

Catalogued in LOT-EK: Objects + Operations (The Monacelli Press), the firm’s second monograph, are projects composed of upcycled materials—largely the shipping-container works that LOT-EK is known for. Such structures present the possibility that perhaps humanity’s discarded innovations can save us from the very problems we created.
—Surfacemagazine

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