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Leslie Lok

  • Associate Professor (on sabbatical)

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Academic Research Areas

  • Architectural design
  • Architectural practice
  • Architectural technology
  • Cities
  • Housing
  • Material practice
  • Sustainability
  • Urbanism
  • Visual representation

Leslie Lok is an associate professor at Cornell University in the Department of Architecture and directs the Rural-Urban Building Innovation Lab. Working with non-standardized and natural materials, her research and teaching explore the intersection of technology, novel material methods, and urbanization. By studying regional behaviors from spatial transformation to material resources, her work contextualizes design strategies with computational protocols and mixed reality technologies to develop novel forms of making and adaptable housing designs in rural-urban contexts.

Lok is a cofounder at HANNAH, an experimental design practice working across scales. HANNAH’s work utilizes innovative forms of construction, from 3D printing to robotic fabrication to advance building practices. The work aims to mine the tension between machine means and architectural ends. HANNAH was the recipient of the 2020 Architectural League Prize, named Best New Practices 2021 by ArchDaily, and named Next Progressives by Architect Magazine in 2018.

Lok also currently serves on ACADIA’s board of directors. Her work has been published internationally by FABRICATE, Rob|Arch, and ACADIA, as well as featured in Architectural Record, Architect Magazine, The New York Times, Dwell, and others. Her contributions were exhibited at the Total Museum of Contemporary Art in South Korea, the 2020 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, the 2022 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Shenzhen, Art OMI, and The Momentary. Lok received her Master of Architecture at MIT.

A woman with black hair standing in front of a concrete wall

Academic Research Areas

  • Architectural design
  • Architectural practice
  • Architectural technology
  • Cities
  • Housing
  • Material practice
  • Sustainability
  • Urbanism
  • Visual representation
  • Wood and metal tower constructed on the grass in an open area surrounded by buildings on Cornell University campus.
  • Closeup image of a wooden beam tower with metal braces, positioned in front of a tree with orange leaves.
  • Wooden beams with metal braces are on a sidewalk with a person using mixed reality glasses staring at the beams
  • Modern cabin with vertical blond wood siding and a large picture window positioned in a forest clearing.
  • Three images of an irregular log structure with various colors superimposed on each image.
  • Blueprint images for an irregular timber log structure with each part of the structure explained.
  • Mixed reality visualization for an irregularly shaped timber structure, superimposed in front of a concrete wall.

Leslie Lok, Matthew Reiter, Kurt Jordan, and Sasa Zivkovic, Unlog Tower (2022), 2022 Cornell Biennial, Ithaca, NY.

Leslie Lok, Matthew Reiter, Kurt Jordan, and Sasa Zivkovic, Unlog Tower (2022), 2022 Cornell Biennial, Ithaca, NY.

Leslie Lok, Matthew Reiter, Kurt Jordan, and Sasa Zivkovic, mixed reality aided construction interface, Unlog Tower (2022), 2022 Cornell Biennial, Ithaca, NY.

HANNAH, Ashen Cabin.

RUBI Lab, Timber De-standardized 1.0.

RUBI Lab, Timber De-standardized 1.0.

RUBI Lab, Timber De-standardized 2.0.

Publications

  • Timber De-standardized 2.0: Mixed Reality Visualizations and User Interface for Processing Irregular Timber

    Lok, Leslie, and Jiyoon Bae. 25th International Conference on Computer-Aided Architecture Design Research in Asia, RE: Anthropocene, Design in the Age of Humans, CAADRIA, 2022.

  • Timber De-standardized: A Mixed Reality Framework for the Assembly of Irregular Tree Log Structures

    Lok, Leslie, Asbiel Samaniago, and Lawson Spencer. ACADIA 2021: Realignments toward Critical Computation. Paper Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA), 2021.

  • Re-defining the Rural-urban: Discovering Spatial Patterns of Chinese Rural Development

    Lok, Leslie. 2020 ACSA: Open, Global Urbanism Session. Proceedings of the 108th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), 2020.

  • Making Form Work — Experiments along the Grain of Concrete and Timber

    Zivkovic, Sasa, and Leslie Lok. In FABRICATE 2020: Making Resilient Architecture. Jane Burry, Jenny Sabin, and Bob Sheil (eds). London, UK: UCL Press, 2020.

Classes

  • Design III: Material Sense

    ARCH 2101

  • Option Studio: The Sectional City — Urban Housing Fabric for Chongqing

    ARCH 4101/5101/7912

  • Option Studio: Fabric Urbanism — Strategies for Urban Mat-housing and Fabrication

    ARCH 4101/5101/7912

  • Special Topics in Visual Representation: Drawing City Manifestos

    ARCH 4509/6509

  • Spatial Tensions: Mapping Global Spatio-politics Through China

    ARCH 6408/6509

Selected Awards, Grants, and Fellowships

Selected Exhibitions and Presentations

  • Additive Architectural Elements: A New Robotic Brutalism

    Pinkcomma Gallery, Boston, MA, 2018.

  • Digital Vernacular

    International Union of Architects World Congress, Seoul COEX Convention Center, 2017.

  • Micro, ABC:MTL

    Exhibition with Gilles Saucier, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2013.

  • Constructing Future Cities

    2019 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Shenzhen, China, 2019.

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