Research
& News.
Field notes, research, case studies, and firm news from Atlas Lantz Studio — published as we go. The studio publishes in six registers: News for announcements, Research for in-progress investigations, Case Studies for completed work, On the Boards for projects currently in development, On Curiosity for the questions that shape practice, and our monthly Atlas Listening Club which connects our studio’s love of music into deeper dives on culture around the world.
The Atlas Listening Club | Vol. 04 September 2026 — The Other Discotheque
The American commercial market pronounced disco dead in the summer of 1979. The rest of the world's dance floor, in the languages Americans do not speak, was having its longest moment. Twenty-nine tracks. One argument: the 4/4 kick had a passport.
Big Bad Things — Learning to Live Next to the Future
The first response to any new thing is almost always no. What carries us across the gap from that rough first meeting to something like welcome — and what it asks of the most consequential building type of the century.
Hello Birdie — The Stadium and the Ground — On Typology
A 10,000-seat badminton academy in Pingshan, and the case for giving the stadium back to the ground it came from.
The Atlas Listening Club | Vol. 03 August 2026 — The Sampled Century
Origin stories, and the three-percent miracle that makes them possible. This month we run backward through forty years of the art of the cool hunt, fascination with the obscure, the chopped, the screwed and the sampled — arriving at the source records that a generation of producers with a Roland SP-1200 and a fresh crate turned into the century's most beloved music.
BETA26 Residence — Eaton Fire Rebuild
Rooted in its site — not placed on top of it. Dumb geometry, warm craft and moody vibes, moments of exuberance, and the pursuit of a quintessential Southern California existence made possible in the threshold between the built and the grown.
The Studio and the School — On Typology
A confidential design studio in Southern California, a century of sealed space, and the case for letting the school back in.
The Atlas Listening Club | Vol. 02 July 2026 — Zeitgeist Gone Global: 1965–1975
A decade of borrowed pop — moved along physical channels, radio signals, pressing plants, cassettes, touring bands, hotel lobbies, returning students — reimagined at every stop, and looping back to close on the reason we listen at all: the answering back.
Zeitgeist Gone Global
The ten-year window when Western pop reached every commercial port at once, and every commercial port slowly answered back. 1965–1975.
Jalan Basar — Kwong Soon & Co Hotel
A 1933 Art Deco foundry on Cavan Road, ninety-one years later. Why an industrial building wore the architectural language of a civic one — and what that has to do with the Greater Southern Waterfront.
Toyi-Toyi: The Travelling Dance of Refusal
Opening the research phase of a KwaZulu-Natal project: the southern African protest dance, its origins in the liberation-war drill camps, and its long afterlife in democratic-era streets, stadiums, and stages.
The Atlas Listening Club | Vol. 01 June 2026 — South, Towards Durban
Fifty years of South African dance music — mbaqanga, soul-jazz, bubblegum, kwaito, amapiano — driving south toward Durban, where the studio is heading next, and looping back to close where Brenda Fassie always ended things — on the dancefloor.
Seeing the Moon Before We Touched It
Gene Shoemaker mapped the geology of another world from telescope photographs in 1961. The framework he built under constraint is still in use today — a case study in disciplined curiosity.
Waikiki Student Center
Not a building that references Hawaiʻi. A building that participates in it — its ecology, its educational culture, and its students' ongoing inquiry into the place they call home.
On the Boards — Alpha26 Private Residence
Early Design Development on a single-family hillside residence in Southern California — cross-laminated timber, V-column perimeter framing, and an asymmetric roof that pushes back on LA's placeless stucco box.
Certified as an LGBTBE through the NGLCC
Atlas Lantz Studio is now certified as an LGBTQ+ Business Enterprise through the National LGBTQ+ & Allied Chamber of Commerce.
Atlas Lantz Studio Founded
Andy Lantz launches an ideas-driven architecture and design practice — built for a world that no longer waits.