OOWOO is an architectural practice based in Los Angeles, authored by Danny Ortega, Anna Lim, and Nicholas Houser. Our work extends beyond buildings and embraces design as a way of thinking, one that moves fluidly across spatial, material, and cultural forms. We see architecture as a living character that listens, grows, and adapts through the contexts that shape it. Each project becomes a presence that learns to coexist with its surroundings; evolving as part of a larger ecology of people and place.
Through our modes of tools and making, we explore how architecture can exist between intention and indeterminacy, between the abstract and the constructed. We treat software, fabrication, and material assembly as instruments that shape process and form. The work remains rigorous in its construction yet soft in its adaptability; precise in its geometry yet open to interpretation; familiar in its presence yet always seeking something new.
Rather than treating buildings as static forms, we understand them as characters in architecture. These characters act, listen, and shift within their environments; they possess their own behaviors, attitudes, and conditions that shape the way they coexist with others. Architecture, in this sense, becomes a stage for interaction: a place where form and material meet the human body, and where empathy, movement, and environment create meaning. Our projects ask how these characters might live with people rather than around them, and how construction might become a conversation between making and living.
NO NATION EMBASSY, for example, exists between architecture and provocation. It is a speculative project that questions the notion of identity, sovereignty, and the architectural symbol of the embassy. By translating bureaucratic form into spatial experience, the project reimagines what representation means for those without a nation. Here, walls and thresholds act less as boundaries and more as agents of negotiation: porous, shifting, and temporary. The project is both a critique and a proposal: a place where architecture becomes political fiction, testing the limits of inclusion and belonging in the built environment.
GABIONSCAPE extends this conversation into the material realm. The project reimagines the gabion not as containment but as transformation, using recycled rubble, concrete fragments, and steel mesh to create a living structure that changes with time. It merges landscape and architecture into a porous framework that invites growth and weathering. The surface breathes and shifts, carrying within it the memory of the city’s material life. Gabionscape demonstrates how architecture can act as both process and organism, a structure that learns to age, decay, and regenerate alongside its environment.
3X continues this exploration at the scale of the domestic. It reinterprets the Los Angeles bungalow as a system of adaptable volumes that multiply the potential of a single family lot. The project proposes a modular framework organized around centralized service cores that condense circulation and utilities. This allows the living spaces to expand, contract, and shift according to the lives of their inhabitants. Built from mass timber and renewable materials, 3X balances prefabrication with warmth and specificity. It envisions density not as repetition but as flexibility, where architecture can grow with its users and evolve with its city.
OOWOO’s work begins with empathy and precision and finds its form through process and curiosity. Each project is a study in coexistence, an attempt to understand how architecture can live alongside people, materials, and environments. Our goal is to design with both intention and openness, creating architecture that is responsive, adaptive, and quietly transformative.