Johan WijeSinghe
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I’m Johan WijeSinghe, a designer and researcher based in London, originally from Los Angeles. I’m curious about how decisions are made and how to make wonderful buildings. Not just efficient, but well made, with joyful experiences.
I started out at Escher GuneWardena, caring for modernist houses in Los Angeles, including conservation work on the Eames House and the restoration of the Pilot House. Those houses taught me that the best buildings are the ones people keep wanting to care for. They also made me wonder why so few new buildings are designed and made well.
So I went looking for how the next generation of innovative buildings is being thought about at scale. At LEVER Architecture I was part of the innovation team, where research and building happened side by side. I worked on Kirkland Urban East, a six-storey timber office with a diagrid structure, and on new facilities to test acoustic and fire performance: the Oregon Acoustic Research Lab and the OSU Fire Testing Lab. Through the Energy Trust of Oregon Net Zero Fellowship, I led life-cycle carbon modelling comparing Passive House and mass timber, published as Seeing the Forest Through the Trees (2025). The team and I secure over $3M in research funding and co-developed Forest-to-Frame, a USDA-funded procurement platform, Ecotrust and Sustainable Northwest.
At ETH Zurich I taught Architecture in Large Quantities with AUAR Gilles Retsin, looking at how generative AI and prefabrication can deliver affordable housing. Then the fires came to my hometown, and the research suddenly felt urgent. With the Altadena Collective, I helped turn it into a simpler, shared way to rebuild more than 80 cottage homes. The work is still going, and you can support it here.
Our teaching kept coming back to the same point: the companies building our future are mostly started by people who haven’t spent time building and devloping. So Gilles and I started Startup Architecture, a conference on architecture as a venture-backed business.
Currently I’m at Waugh Thistleton, on the research and consultancy team, bringing new materials and building systems to market across the USA, Europe and Australia.
We’re at the start of another revolution. The tools and infrastructure for how we build are being made right now, and not always by people who care how things turn out. I’m hopeful anyway. If makers and fellow nerds take part, this era can produce buildings that are better, more beautiful and made from regenerative materials. That’s what I want to build next.
I earned a Master of Science degree from University College London (2018 to 2019), where his dissertation, Domain Transfer for Architecture, focused on deep learning frameworks and was supervised by Dr Sean Hanna. I completed his Bachelor of Architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (2012 to 2017) and spent a semester studying in Vienna, Austria at the University of Applied Arts (2016). My work has been shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Royal Academy of Arts.