HANNAH Design Office

HANNAH is an experimental design and research studio working across scales from furniture to urbanism. From the ground up, digital design and fabrication technologies are intrinsic to the making of our work, facilitating fundamentally new material methods, tectonic articulations, environmental practices, technological affordances, and forms of construction. In our projects, we aim to mine the tension between machine means and architectural ends. We reclaim authorship over processes of construction that influence the way we can build – or perhaps ought to build in the future. HANNAH does not obsess over technology for technology’s sake: as designers, we consider ourselves to be biased generalists rather than specialists. We inform form. At various scales, our work’s performance and architectural expression is inherently derived from materiality, digital construction protocols, robotic routines, new technologies, odd construction techniques, and bottom-up design logics. At the same time, in a mix of means, it is inspired by precedent, history, program, ecological considerations, collective labor, personal obsessions, and the creative misuse of technology. Led by Leslie Lok & Sasa Zivkovic, HANNAH was named Next Progressives by Architect Magazine in 2018 and won the Architectural League Prize in 2020. Leslie Lok is a co-principal at HANNAH, an award-winning experimental design practice for built and speculative projects. Lok is also an assistant professor and the B.Arch Coordinator at Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Lok's research and teaching explore the intersection of housing, urbanization, and mass-customized construction methods at multiple scales. At Cornell, Lok directs the Urban Construction Laboratory (UCL). By implementing novel material methods, new processes of construction, and robotic mass-customization, the lab aims to develop alternate housing typologies and urbanization models with a focus on locally adaptable housing systems and infrastructures. Lok received her Master of Architecture degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sasa Zivkovic is a co-principal at HANNAH, an experimental design practice based in Ithaca, New York. Zivkovic is also an assistant professor at Cornell University AAP where he directs the Robotic Construction Laboratory (RCL), an interdisciplinary research group that develops and implements novel robotic construction technology. Interdisciplinary in nature, the work integrates cutting-edge materials, advanced fabrication, mechanical design, architectural computation, structural optimization, and sustainable construction. His academic research has been published at FABRICATE, Rob|Arch, ACADIA, ACSA, and RILEM Digital Concrete, among others. Zivkovic received his Master of Architecture degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. HANNAH was founded in 2014 by Alexander Chmarin, Alexander Graf, Leslie Lok, and Sasa Zivkovic.