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When Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano are asked to give a lecture--and this happens more and more often these days--they don't have to panic about what remarks to prepare. The founders of eight-year-old architecture and design firm Lot/ek (pronounced "low tech") know they can rely on something they call "Urban Scan." Part performance piece and part slide show, it operates as a kind of prefab, one-size-fits-all oratorical package.

Tolla and Lignano have used Urban Scan about 20 times during the last two years. It combines photographs of grittily attractive New York streetscapes (a colorful row of newspaper racks on a Manhattan corner, telephone wires crisscrossing a blue sky) with a collection of more than 1,000 English words. During the lecture, one of the architects introduces the photographs, while the other recites words plucked from the list that relate--directly or obliquely--to the imagery.

You can see a partial list of the words on the Lot/ek Web site . At first, it looks like a randomly selected, alphabetically arranged assortment, cascading from "abandon" all the way to "zoom," passing through "epoxy," "hiccup," and "telecommunication" along the way. The more of these words you read, however, the more they begin to remind you of those little poetry magnets that people stick on their refrigerators. You feel an urge to play around with them, to string them together. Tolla has referred to the words as a kind of philosophy-in-aggregate for Lot/ek, and if you sort through them with this idea in mind, you can begin to make connections between the list and the firm's work. Eventually, working in the spirit of creative reuse that guides all of Tolla and Lignano's projects, you can assemble a sentence that comes pretty close to summing up the firm and its theoretical approach: Foreign pair occupy urban fringe; create specialized slang; ignore up-to-the-minute, futuristic jargon; reuse throwaway object (TV, vehicle); captivate media.

It may not be the most grammatically attractive sentence ever written, but parsing it does evoke the appeal of Lot/ek, a firm that in the last couple of years has moved from relative obscurity to rising-star status.

FOREIGN PAIR

Tolla and Lignano, who are both 36, met in the late 1980s as students at the University of Naples. They came to the United States after they were offered a pair of research fellowships at Columbia University for the 1990-91 academic year. For two southern Italians living in America for the first time, New York was a revelation. "When we got here," Tolla recalls, "we were incredibly curious. We were like bugs, running all over the city." They became fascinated with the idea of reading New York as a jagged industrial landscape, in contrast to the deeply historical Italian cities they were familiar with. Walking through the streets, they considered the city's architecture in a way that American-born designers often fail to do. They noticed how fire escapes crawl across the facade of nearly every building in older neighborhoods and the way other elements--such as air conditioners jutting out of windows--perch like parasites on existing architecture. "In some ways, New York and Naples are very similar," Lignano says. "They're both port cities, both chaotic and anarchic. But there is of course this absence of history in America, which leads to complete freedom of expression, allowing people to build in all kinds of ways. To see that was liberating for us."

OCCUPY URBAN FRINGE

Once their fellowship year was over, Tolla and Lignano began looking for space for the firm they'd decided to create together. They rented an office in Manhattan's Meat Packing District, above a plumbing store. (Despite the neighborhood's newfound trendiness, their block continues to feel, with its big sky and empty sidewalks, like Manhattan's Wild West.) Soon Tolla and Lignano bought the yellow side panel of an old semitrailer, painted it with the name of their new firm, Lot/ek, and used it to bisect their office. The panel rotates on a central axis, dividing an apartment in back (where Lignano lives; he and Tolla are not a couple) from an open workspace in front.

They felt energized and alone. They had all kinds of ideas about the work they wanted to do, but no connections. "All the other arts have this framework already in place," Tolla says. "Whatever kind of work you do, there is a system set up between you and whoever you're ultimately working for. If you're an artist, there are galleries. Architecture and design have none of that. Even more because we're not from here, we felt that to create a network in the architecture world is extremely difficult."

Indeed, Lot/ek's work, which so far has mostly come in the form of gallery installations and interior renovations, retains a faint outsider feel. It certainly has a freshness that comes from seeing the American landscape with unjaded but critical foreign eyes. Like many young firms, Lot/ek has slowly made a name for itself designing projects for less-than-conspicuous spaces, including a long-neglected basement gallery at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and small lofts for non-celebrities.

CREATE SPECIALIZED SLANG

Yes, what about that name? Lot/ek is meant, of course, to stand for "low technology." In that sense it represents the founders' interest in inert, prefabricated industrial objects--made of rubber, foam, stainless steel--which they use to create everything from sleeping lofts to seat cushions to shelving. But there's a lot more buried in the title. The name's odd spelling is typical of its era; in recent years, slashes have been trendy in the arts (Bill T. Jones's dance work Still/Here, for example) as well as in pop culture (the John Woo film Face/Off). The slash also suggests cutting, which the firm does to most of those industrial objects to make them fit into their new environments. Addition-ally, it is meant to mimic a computer command and to symbolize the division between first and third worlds, a divide that Lot/ek consistently aims to straddle. Finally, the name signals that technology is a central concern in Lot/ek's work; it remains a preoccupation, even if it is being questioned and reconsidered, brought low and sliced up.

IGNORE UP-TO-THE-MINUTE, FUTURISTIC JARGON

If there's one prevailing trend in the design world right now, it is the increasingly broad application of the fluid, stripped-down forms made possible by di-gital technology. An important part of Lot/ek's work, however, moves against that grain. Many of the firm's projects are about coming to grips with a world that is not nearly as clean and streamlined as those computer-generated images would suggest. Lot/ek's work is a reminder that we live in cities still littered with industrial detritus of all kinds. Indeed, Lignano resists the very concept of a Zeitgeist-driven movement. "We want to push very far from the idea of style," he says. "This is a time in architecture when the leading figures, like or hate them, are pursuing their own individual paths. Frank Gehry is doing Gehry, Daniel Libeskind is doing Libes-kind, Zaha Hadid is doing Hadid. They're all using different languages and ideals. But much of architecture is still caught up in the style of the moment." He continues: "The only thing that it does is make sure that everything is leveled down to a kind of mediocrity. And it's not like this in the other arts: If two painters are doing exactly the same thing, they are judged negatively."

REUSE THROWAWAY OBJECT (TV, VEHICLE)

And so Lot/ek's founders are unabashed about producing work that is highly idiosyncratic. Because the firm consistently finds new uses for industrial objects that have had past lives as truck parts or shipping containers, many have given Lot/ek an ecological tag it never sought. "Publications from Vogue all the way up to architectural journals have loved the idea of picturing us as recyclers," Lignano says. "But our work is not about recycling. It's about creating a dialogue between our clients' desires and intentions and the objects that we encounter." He says those objects "tell us stuff" and that he and Tolla are obliged to listen. "We are interested in playing with objects because of their presence," Tolla says. "The fact that objects have already had a life adds a layer of texture and energy to spaces."

In a Barrow Street loft renovation for a young computer consultant, Tolla and Lignano centered their scheme on a 40-foot-long oil tank. Since it was too big to fit through the front door of the building, they sliced it into two cylindrical parts and brought them through the window of the loft with a crane. One of the parts now includes two sleeping areas and runs horizontally near the ceiling, bridging two walls; the other part was turned on its end and now forms the shell of two bathrooms, one on top of the other.

Sometimes, in larger projects, Lot/ek merely reveals objects that exist in the landscape, rather than importing them. The firm's design for the Sara Meltzer Gallery, which occupies the site of a former parking garage on West 20th Street, is a case in point. Lot/ek decided to leave intact the metal ramp that led from the street into the space. Not only did that decision follow the firm's practice of basing its designs on "objects that have already had a life," it happened to satisfy all the Americans with Disabilities Act access requirements as well.

In another recent interior project, Lot/ek revamped an office space for Management Artists Organization, an agency that occupies about 2,000 square feet of space on the 14th floor of a building on West 38th Street. The office has just one interior wall, is surrounded on three sides by windows, and overlooks a remarkably monochromatic cityscape. Lot/ek lined that one long wall with stainless-steel truck siding, designed desks that rest on fluorescent-orange skateboard wheels, and laid down a glossy blue poured-epoxy floor. Contrasted with the mass of drably colored buildings visible through the windows, the effect is almost painfully optimistic. It's a workplace squeezed through a Technicolor tube, a blue and silver and orange box of space floating 14 floors above gray Manhattan.

The inclusion of objects like that truck siding or those skateboard wheels gives Lot/ek's work a jolt of unexpected energy. But Tolla and Lignano (and their staff, which currently includes one full-time employee and an intern) ultimately use those items in ways that feel almost paradoxically natural. Tolla and Lignano have learned a lot from installation art, in other words, but their work is also surprisingly practical. "In everything we do," Tolla says, "there is a level of commitment to reality. We want to use real things, not just make them look real."

Not that Lot/ek's work resists the digital world. It is, in fact, about proving that technically savvy work, work that understands technology more than it parades it, can be paired successfully with industrial objects. "Our vision," Tolla says, "and you could even call it our obsession, is to explore what happens when you combine an older object with cutting-edge technology."

Lot/ek's skill in perfecting that mix has helped the firm win some prominent commissions recently, including the design of a video and film exhibition at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art and the renovation of a new-media exhibition space at Manhattan's New Museum. To win the New Museum job, Lot/ek beat out Open Office and Joel Sanders, two other up-and-coming New York firms. All three were asked to come up with a design that would turn an exhibition gallery on the basement level into a combination gallery space and interactive resource center. Tucked away behind the bookstore, the 1,300-square-foot space is awkward; it winds around five stout structural columns toward the back of the building. While the other two firms ignored the ungainly columns, Lot/ek embraced them, turning three of them into computer workstations and hanging video monitors and projectors from the other two. Lot/ek also suggested black rubber flooring and bright-orange seats made from marine buoys.

"What we liked about Lot/ek's proposal was that it offers a real alternate environment," says Anne Ellegood, a New Museum curatorial associate. "It has a lot of character, and it really questions and explores what it means for museums to be showing more and more new-media work. But it also directly addresses all of our basic needs--things like seating and how people would use the space on a daily basis."

In Palm Beach, curator Amy Cappellazzo brought Lot/ek in to design a video and film installation called Making Time. "I wanted an installation that challenged the institutionalization of video in museums," Cappellazzo says. "I think that video doesn't always work in the con-fines of the white Modernist box. And all of the work of theirs I'd seen engages technology in some very smart, sophisticated way." Lot/ek's design for the show included private viewing cubicles padded with egg-crate foam and gallery walls lined with blue pool floats, at hip level, so people could have something to lean against while watching the work.

Tolla and Lignano feel at home in galleries. In fact, their own work has been exhibited at the Deitch Projects gallery in Manhattan, and two pieces of their furniture were included in the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum's inaugural triennial earlier this year. Time and again, they see how far they can push architecture toward the realm of installation art. "There's always this tricky balance in architecture between what you can do and how much you have to be in the background," Tolla says.

According to Lignano, architecture is too often shy when it's mixed with other media. Lot/ek's work in Palm Beach and at the New Museum is in-dicative of their desire to give the design of museum and gallery spaces more nerve. "We don't think that architecture should be just a mute container," he says. For a gallery setting, "most architects create a very nondescript white box, and that leaves to the other arts the ability to qualify that space. What we're suggesting is the idea that architecture itself should be the thing that makes that determination."

In projects like the Barrow Street loft and the museum galleries, Lot/ek employed prefabricated industrial objects. In other work, the firm has given second-hand electronic equipment a second life. The well-known TV-Lite, which was included in the Cooper-Hewitt triennial and is now in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, creates a standing lamp by eviscerating two television sets, stripping them down to their wiring and tubes. Light glows from the two screens, one facing upward and the other toward the floor. For a fundraising dinner at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1996, Lot/ek set old televisions between tabletops so that diners faced one another across a space filled with flickering light. "We want to explore the idea of technology as object," Tolla says, "thinking of it as something that could be part of the architectural space."

CAPTIVATE MEDIA

Architecture-world insiders will hardly be surprised by Tolla and Lignano's growing prominence; for the public, though, Lot/ek may soon appear to have arrived from nowhere. The firm is now quickly graduating from small lofts and basement-level renovations to more prominent projects. Lot/ek's first freestanding building, a pavilion on the grounds of the University of Washington in Seattle, is in the final phases of the design process. (Lot/ek is negotiating with Boeing to use a jet fuselage as the shell for the pavilion.) A renovation for the Manhattan office of Italian publisher Edizione will be finished this summer. Then there's a show of new work at the Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery, due to begin in the fall, and a two-story fashion space in Seoul. Writers and editors are paying attention as well: Lot/ek's name has been dropped in the pages of Wired, the New York Times, and London's Sunday Times, and the firm is currently working with Princeton Architec-tural Press on a book.

It's a lot of attention for two designers still several years shy of 40. The commissions and the critical attention are arriving at the same time; one feeds the other. Lot/ek is no longer an unpronounceable jumble of letters, but a name falling easily from an increasing number of lips. Or, to pick a few additional words from the Urban Scan: Public eager. Buzz, buzz, more buzz. Anticipate quick takeoff.

Christopher Hawthorne, a Metropolis contributing editor, lives in Brooklyn and writes frequently on architecture and design.