Meet Dwayne Oyler | Architect

We had the good fortune of connecting with Dwayne Oyler and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Dwayne, what do you attribute your success to?
Jenny and I have both always been believers in both intellectual ideas and material experimentation. Good ideas alone aren’t enough – you need to be willing to get out there and make it happen. What has set us apart has always been our willingness to get our hands dirty- to make things that others wouldn’t or couldn’t. That willingness to experiment has been not only what made the work possible, its what kept the ideas moving forward.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Relocating from New York to Los Angeles in 2004, our office has utilized the last sixteen years to establish a way of working that is committed to experimentation through a relentless hands-on approach to our work. Heavily invested in academia (currently both of us teach at Sci-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, among others), we consider it our obligation as instructors and architects to not only put ideas forward, but to test their application. We believe that ideas find their greatest potency through the feedback of human experience, material resistance, and iterative processes.

Eager to test our ideas, and impatient in our desire to see the effects of our work, our office turned to our own love of building to transform small projects with modest budgets into a testing ground for our ideas. Los Angeles, Sci-Arc, and Taipei have served as invaluable test beds for our ambitions. Our work consists largely (although not entirely) of work that we have built ourselves. This way of working originally grew out of necessity, an insistence on detail driven work on small budgets, and out of the desire to allow the design process to continually respond to feedback provided by the fabrication process. The lack of conventional separation between the architectural and construction fields has allowed us to use the construction phase as an extension to the design process. It has also provided a more direct translation of ideas from digital form to reality, while ensuring a level of articulation often difficult to achieve through a more conventional means of construction. It has been a period of material discovery, invention, and experimentation that comes only through the difficult, but profoundly rewarding task of realizing the work on a given site. Most importantly, that knowledge brought with it new concepts for building that went beyond the material itself- one that is interested in extending the role of experimental work to better engage ideas of use and human engagement.

Our office has continued to expand on these principles as our portfolio has grown to include larger and more robust projects. The office continues to rely on the constant exchange between design and making, often with small intense installations being built alongside the design of large scale projects. We believe that this insistence on hands-on experimentation should remain one of our most fundamental philosophies and is the key to our continued growth and evolution.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I’m the architect I am today because I’ve worked with a partner for the last 20 years has set the standard for what an architect/designer/entrepreneur/mother/wife/force-of-nature should be, it’s Jenny Wu.

Website: www.oylerwu.com

Instagram: @dwayneoyler

Image Credits
Scott Mayoral Josh White Oyler Wu Collaborative