Firm name: Allthatissolid
Firm leadership: Alex Chew, Danielle Wagner, Max Kuo
Locations: Los Angeles and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Year founded: Incorporated in 2012.
Firm size: Currently four full-time employees and three part-time employees distributed across our Kuala Lumpur and Los Angeles offices.

Education: Chew: B.F.A in interior architecture from The Academy of Art University, M.Arch. from UCLA; Kuo: B.A. in art and M.Arch. from UCLA; Wagner: B.A. in interior architecture from Ohio State University, M.Arch. from UCLA.

Experience: Chew: Huang Iboshi Architecture, NMDA-Inc, American Apparel, Leaddao Technology & Engineering, Solidbuilt, 357NWR; Kuo: Reiser+Umemoto, Fernando Romero Enterprise, Lean Arch; Wagner: Dagmar Richter, Solidbuilt

How founders met: We met as cohorts at the UCLA Architecture and Urban Design M. Arch. program. Our friendship developed during all-nighter furtive smoke breaks out on the roof of Perloff Hall.

Firm mission: Allthatissolid pursues an architecture of alternative world-making that is less interested in exceptionalism but is instead focused on formal strategies of mischief, paradox, and idiosyncrasy. We are equally engaged in architecture as a history and culture of ideas as well as the making of progressive environments that promote shared social spaces. Each partner’s unique specialties and interests focus on various ways of doing so, whether it be Max’s current teaching at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, Danielle’s interests in material fabrication, or Alex’s real estate development.

First commission: Lions Den was a streetwear and sneaker boutique located in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. The project began during our last semester in graduate school and was fabricated by CNC machines and our own blood, sweat, and tears that following summer. Even then, we were interested in how the integrated shoe-wall display and storage system could extend beyond the storefront as a nocturnal place-making device, uplifting the local nightlife as a social commons.

Defining project: Gamuda Town Centre was a pivotal urban design project that allowed us to speculate on a much larger scale. In fact, scalar mischief was the conceptual device that propelled the design. The client’s brief asked us to create a town center from scratch to serve a new exurban real estate development an hour outside of Kuala Lumpur. We were fascinated by the impulse to transplant ready-made city structure out to the middle of nowhere. Our proposal hybridizes big box interiors with medieval streets and piazzas, all wrapped up in a fine-grained stylistic mash-up of Malaysian vernacular, European Renaissance, and Postmodernism. This streetscape belies a radically different mixed-use interior. Several outdoor recreational spaces inscribe themselves onto the vast sloping roofscapes to produce a simultaneous reading of both the very large and the very small. The conflation of formal contradictions and the production of a public commons has become an architectural theme that we continually return to.

How would you describe the personality of your practice? Our practice is friendly. It is built upon friendship that evolves through all our messy and vibrant conversations, disagreements, and necessary changes. As a natural outgrowth of that ethic, we approach all of our clients, students, employees, contractors, and partners through friendship. Of course, business conflicts and misunderstandings inevitably arise. But friendliness assumes an empathy for individuals that goes beyond appreciating their specific expertise and professional role. We find that to be a more joyful approach to our collaborations as a human enterprise.

One design trend that should be left behind: Material transparency and open plans. It’s funny to consider these two trends, and not the lasting legacies of high Modernism. But we find that their ubiquitous applications in lifestyle architecture to be quite anodyne. We appreciate architecture that modulates a far greater range of spatial and lighting effects.

Favorite rule to break: Architecture should be tectonically and indexically honest.

Most successful collaboration: Qolab was a proposal for an LGBTQ+ gaming and co-work concept for a client in New York City. Although the project was never built, we learned so much from that collaboration. Not only did we get introduced to the gayming community, their needs, and desires for a safe space, but also the fascinating business model whose architectural implications brought together many of our own interests in “phygital” environments, the choreography of social spaces, and public commons as an immersive entertainment and physical experience.

Ambitions for the firm in the coming five years: While most of our commissioned work is for private residential clients, we hope to develop more projects that engage institutional clients whose aspirations address urban collectives. We are currently working with UCLA’s cityLAB and the School of Theater Film and Television to develop a student well-being lounge. This process has been a very rewarding learning experience where our talents and resources can be maximized towards meeting the needs and challenges for a wide variety of users.

Design tool of choice:
We are very interested in painting and consistently incorporate their influences in our design methodology. Whether it be from the Song Dynasty or Ellsworth Kelly, paintings offer abstract constructions of optical phenomena that allow us to speculate upon how three-dimensional form can be extracted from the effects of perspectival relationships. One of our favorite treatise on this topic is David Hockney’s masterclass commentary and analysis found in, Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China.

What are you reading? What’s on your bookshelf? Chew: Order Without Design, Alain Bertaud. The book connects markets, design, and city development, making a compelling case to reconcile the disciplines of urban planning with urban economics to improve the way we conceptualize, design, and plan at this scale. Kuo: Tower of Babylon by Ted Chiang riffs on the biblical proposal of building a tower to heaven. In spite of the fantastical premise, the short story speculates on the profound empirical effects of architecture, producing worlds, mythology, social patterns, and microecologies within itself. Wagner: The Grand Domestic Revolution by Dolores Hayden is a tremendous historical examination into material feminists speculating on alternative models of housing in order to socialize domestic work. It’s time we draw inspiration from these examples as we reimagine more pleasurable, sustainable, and communitarian approaches to architectural and societal structures.

This article appeared in ARCHITECT’s April 2023 issue.

Read more about emerging firms: Formation Association works to “strike a dialectic somewhere between the professional and the peculiar.” |
Via Chicago Architects + Diseñadores is focused on “raising the bar of arquitectura cotidiana.” | Delma Palma wants to do away with the “idea that one person behind a desk can best understand how to design for a community of users.”