He’ll be awarded the prestigious AIA|LA’s Emerging Practice award this October 2018—Ed Ogosta, AIA. But Ogosta’s sense of Los Angeles and, in fact, the profession of architecture in which he is materializing as an important voice, invokes a reverence for the past and how it can be reimagined in present.

In perusing his responses to the Q&A we put to all Presidential Honorees, we also discovered another secret about him. Though his answers were succinct, they painted vivid, clear pictures. (A skill surely appreciated by his clients.) He doesn’t just want to visit a certain Case Study House, but the time of his foray, the activity, the visual, are also part of his vision…We won’t give it away, he’ll say it better than us anyway.

Here, then: Ed Ogosta’s Los Angeles, which begins not today, but with a relative many years ago.

AIA|LA: Favorite place to eat in Los Angeles?
Edward Ogosta, AIA: A double-dipped beef sandwich at Philippe the Original in downtown simply cannot be beat. The place has an incredible sense of atmosphere: sawdust on the floor, worn tabletops, cardboard plates, little cracks in the plaster. My grandfather lunched there regularly throughout the 50’s and 60’s, when coffee was seven cents (now it’s $0.45).

(Celebrate Ed Ogosta, AIA, at the 2018 Design Awards Ceremony + Party. Here’s how.)

Dream Commission. What current site, project, or building in Los Angeles would you reconceive? Why and how?
Way out at the end of the Port of LA sits Municipal Harbor Warehouse No. 1, a beautiful, mysterious, massive building constructed a century ago that now sits unused. I’d love to see this building and its surrounding landscape reborn into an arts or cultural destination to reinvigorate the harbor—something ambitious on the scale of Dia:Beacon, the Tate Modern, or Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie.

Okay, a commission or project that you’ve done. Tell us a story about it that we don’t already know.
In chatting with the client at the end of the interview for our Hangar Office project, we discovered both our ancestral families had roots in the same incredibly tiny coal town in Pennsylvania, and, improbably, it turns out were distantly related. That sealed the deal, and we were awarded the commission on the spot. Sometimes it’s all just luck.

If you had four hours off and could spend it anywhere in Los Angeles, where would it be?
In the pool at Case Study House #22, at dusk.

Been to the Design Awards before? Tell us about a moment that stands out, whether it’s inspirational, behind-the-scenes, or lighthearted.
When Larry Scarpa accepted the Gold Medal at last year’s ceremony, he ran a slideshow with photos of every employee, going back to the beginning of his practice. This to me seemed the model response for such an occasion: never forgetting to recognize and champion each person, no matter how junior, who helped to do the work.