5810:OAl0

Atelier 58l0 is a collective of designers based in New York and Tokyo, exploring architecture through unconventional mediums. Moving beyond the built world, we engage with film, virtual reality, objects, and print to expand how architecture is experienced and understood. We aim to make architectural ideas more accessible while questioning their place in an era of mass commodification.

  • Co-founder / Director

    Kevlin believes architecture as the experience of space in time. His design interests are rooted in exploring the dynamic and sentient qualities of architecture, concerning elements of duration and sequence. He is captivated by the mobile components of architecture, which come in the form of elevators, escalators, vehicles and modular parts. His Thesis Prize project, Life, Death, and the Eternal Recurrence of Architecture challenges the static nature of existing preservation strategies and proposes the strategy of replication to create ‘save as’ versions of the original. Thus architecture becomes a physical timeline.

    Kelvin is currently a Master of Architecture II candidate at Harvard GSD, having completed his Bachelor of Architecture at Pratt Institute. Previously, he has worked at the Store Development department at Giorgio Armani, and at Risland US - the developer for Skyline Tower in Long Island City. He also teaches at the Center for Architecture in New York during the summers.

  • Creative Director

    Charon Hu specializes in incorporating literature, philosophy and art in his architectural theories and designs. His diverse portfolio of knowledge enables him to extract from a wide pool of sensibilities, which he then uses to create unique configurations in his design process. 

    Charon had always been fascinated by the space between space (Liminal Space). Since his undergraduate journey, he had been continuously developing his understanding of liminal spaces. With its manifestations informing and evolving with each of his projects.

    Graduated with distinction at Master of Spatial Performance and Design (Interdisciplinary Studies) from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, with a Bachelor of Architecture from the New York Institute of Technology. In the past few years, Charon developed and created various performances, short films and installations featured in Shoreditch Arts Club and Camden Market in London, as well as at the Teatro Alberto in Lisbon, Portugal.

  • Lead Designer

    Youngdae Song is currently a Senior Designer at Sou Fujimoto Architects. His architectural backgrounds lie in various international environments such as Seoul, New York, Mexico City, and Tokyo. Youngdae has been participating in diverse key projects from pavilion to masterplan scale with a notable contribution to the Winning International Competition “Shenzhen Reform and Opening-up Exhibition Hall” as a Core Designer.

    Youngdae’s thesis project titled “Liquid Playground: Experiential Transparency” was published in The Korean Institute of Culture Architecture with an award. The project investigated a new type of spatial relativity to re-define and transform Korean architecture’s historical elements eave and landscape into fluid shading spaces and experiential fields. His project “Non-objects: Hidden Closet” was exhibited in Luis Barragán’s Casa Gilardi and Liga DF in Mexico City. His group work “Adaptable Terrain” was also installed in Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul. Youngdae gave a lecture titled “Beyond Sceneries” for the AIAS Pratt Lecture Series with his own analysis and deep understanding of Japanese architecture.

    Youngdae holds a Master's degree in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University and Bachelor of Architecture from Seoul National University of Science and Technology.

  • Lead Designer

    Emmet Sutton is an alumni and undergraduate professor at Pratt Institute. At Pratt he received the AIA New York Center for Architecture Design Scholarship. His Honors degree project, Bypassage, contemplates the corridor, its history, and potential future. The project comprises a variety of new types of corridors interlinked to create a peripatetic medical school appended to the existing Woodhull Medical Center. In concert with his thesis, this line of corridor exploration was also exhibited at the Center for Architecture as part of an event organized and curated by Atelier 58l0.

    Emmet recently completed a residency on governor’s island with the Institute of Public Architecture. His work with the IPA builds on Bypassage, revolving around the political and economic implications of the corridor, namely lobbying and labor.

    Previously he has worked with Shohei Shigematsu at OMA NY, Rem Koolhaas at OMA EU, and Steven Holl at SHA. Currently, Emmet operates TUSK, an architecture office, with his two partners Safa Mehrjui and Tyler Javitz.

    www.tusk.archi

  • Lead Designer

    Jack Young, originally Atelier 58l0’s technical designer and now lead designer, is a multidisciplinary designer and researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. He is a multidisciplinary designer and researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. He is currently in the final semester of the Bachelor of Architecture program at Pratt Institute, where he is conducting thesis research on the civic revitalization of the United States Postal Service and its associated mailing logistics system, examined through a chroma-regional lens.

    In addition to his thesis work, Jack is actively involved in advanced research projects with academic collaborators. He works alongside Professor Jason Vigneri Beane on various AI and fabrication projects, a leading digital analyst on the Laboratory of Integrated Archaeological Visualization and Heritage’s (LIAVH) M-LAB project at Mohenjo-Daro, contributes as an undergraduate GIS researcher for Pratt’s graduate-level Spatial Analysis & Visualization Initiative, and is part of a design team developing a prototype housing solution for the indigenous Alaskan community of Quinhagak.

    Beyond his academic pursuits, Jack holds various roles within the architectural and design literary communities; serving as an editor for the 25’ Off Zine and supporting several Axiomatic Editions book publications. Professionally, Jack is a Junior Designer at Billings Jackson Studio, where he specializes in the architectural and industrial design of public and private transportation infrastructure projects.

    With a focus on combining architectural design, technological innovation, and social impact, Jack continues to pursue projects that bridge the gap between traditional practice and emerging research fields.

  • Technical Designer

    Lee is a Technical Designer at Atelier 58l0, where she plays a key role in translating design concepts into interactive digital experiences using Unreal Engine 4 and 5. 

    Alongside her role at Atelier 58l0, Lee has worked as a Research Assistant at Pratt Institute, where she explored object-oriented programming for architectural design. With a focus on generative programming in Grasshopper, she aided in creating tools that suggest and integrate new geometric forms within architectural design processes.

    Lee now works as the Digital Production Manager at the Assembly Loop Lab (ALL) in Pratt Institute. The ALL is a design development think tank, supports innovation in fields like robotics, mechatronics, and collaborative computation. She oversees a variety of projects where digital ideals are met in physical reality and contributes to the lab's mission of shaping the future of education and architectural practice by supporting cutting-edge research and technological output.

  • Co-founder / Manager

    Geri Roa Kim is currently an M.Arch II candidate at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where she is also a member of the Harvard Innovation Lab. She co-founded Atelier 58l0 and serves as its Director while also partnering at SaulKim Studio.

    Roa's architectural work explores the intersection of technology and spatial design, with a particular focus on virtual reality as a medium for architectural innovation and education.

    A graduate of Pratt Institute with highest honors, Roa received the Arthur Edwards Award for Outstanding Scholarship and won the Best Thesis Prize for her work titled Life, Death, and the Eternal Recurrence of Architecture. She also minored in Museum and Gallery Practice, studied Art as Global Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and was the recipient of the Eleanor Allwork Scholarship from AIA New York. Her past professional experience includes serving as an educator at the AIA New York | Center for Architecture.

The Many Shapes of Atelier 58l0

When a collective emerges from its cocoon, the bystanders pick up the vulnerable creature and inspect under its bellies for two things - the medium in which they will be operating, and the values they are looking to impose. If we are to evaluate some of our most well known predecessors, we can surmise that the intrinsic relation between their ideas and the forms in which they took place. Take Archigram, whose name was derived from the combination of the words “architecture” and “telegram". Under the golden age of magazines between the 1960-90, members of the group engaged with the premier form of lionization at the time and emerged as a major architectural aesthetic for the era. Their critiques take the forms of satirical depictions of urbanism - oft taking the conclusion drawn by various architectural ideals and pushing them towards the extreme. The projects from these efforts sewn seamlessly into the medium of magazines.

Gilles Deleuze wrote in his Dialogues: “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” Post Dadaism, we now view both brick-slinging and bricklaying as creative acts. It is imperative then, that we identify the shapes of our bricks and the medium of our era.

Architecture is no longer a monolith of discipline - during our age of information, the Bauhaus of today takes the form of the internet - architects of today can no longer be content with merely sharing a hallway with its neighboring creative disciplines. Architects are therefore compelled to engage in these practices in order to understand their framework. To be in bed with the audience of today - whose phones are now as paramount to their perception as another form of senses. Contemporary architects have to utilize the frameworks they have acquired and create contents from the mediums of the informational era.

As commodified architecture became the mundanity, contemporary architects may better understand their own position from precedence of its cousins. The dadaist and pop artists have created their own responses in regards to the commodification of their mediums, contemporary pop art have leveraged the market towards their own benefit. Architects should learn from their success and elevate our mundane commodified spaces into realms of curiosity and even reverence.

Atelier 58l0 - Core Beliefs

1. Architecture theory from mundanity

Architecture must bridge the gap between the discipline and the public. The value of design should not be confined to architects alone but made accessible to everyone. Rather than diluting ideas to appeal to everyone, we begin with the mundane—everyday spaces and objects that many can relate to. Through these, we create projects that bridge familiarity with the rigor of architectural thinking.

2. Architecture as a simulacrum

Different mediums open up unique ways to experience architecture, which should directly inform the design. An architecture made for film, a stage set, or a game doesn’t need to be designed with the same considerations as something meant to be built. The possibilities of each medium should be explored more critically. So far, architecture has been widely experimented with through image making and physical models, but it can also be explored through videos, VR/AR, objects, sound, performance, games, comics, zines, photographs, etc. What kind of experiences can these mediums unlock?

3. Preservation of architecture in its totality

Preservation goes beyond physical structures. Architecture embodies the attitudes and perspectives of its time, and these, too, must be preserved. Traditional methods like models, drawings, and photographs are effective but incomplete. Filmmaking, VR/AR, short form videos, and emerging mediums offer untapped potential for capturing the essence of architecture—its form, ideas, and the zeitgeist it reflects through lenses that extend far beyond the conventional.

4. Consciousness of commodification

To be conscious of how commodification has shaped the new normal for architecture. Instead of fighting against the tide, we should leverage the market to our own advantage. To utilize the same methods of pop artists—to wrestle the power of aesthetic and capital back to designers and architects, to transform the mundane into objects of reverence, and to package them as products.