Since studying together at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), Ryan Bollom and DK Osseo-Asare, cofounders of Low Design Office (LOWDO) and Emerging Voices 2021 winners, have forged an unconventional practice guided by the question “What does it mean to make good design accessible to everyday people?”
Their time in Harvard’s heady intellectual environment helped them develop a confident architectural stance. “We took the position that the only way to be radical was to build,” said Osseo-Asare, who now lives in State College, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Pennsylvania State University. “Even if ideas can be radical and transformative, we felt like if you really wanted to fight for just and equitable spaces, you had to realize them in the physical world.”
After graduate school, that philosophy took them in different directions. Bollom’s path led him to Hawaii,…
