When Amy Seo and Shahar Cohen founded Second Edition with Bill Clifton—a director of Robert Plumb Collective—they’d just wrapped their Masters of Architecture, with a thesis centered on deconstruction and reuse. Since then, their research-driven, highly experimental practice has bloomed into a radical force for waste minimisation. Collaborating with architects, fabricators and builders, Second Edition reimagines how reuse can be embedded into the building process—saving materials from landfill and working toward resource efficiency. Realising their architectural training often separated them from the act of building, the pair often situate themselves at construction sites. (“We wanted to get our hands dirty,” they once told a reporter.)
“A lot of our work deals with materials and limitations,” explain Seo and Cohen, so we are constantly testing, sampling and prototyping how to use them. In one project, Offcut Kitchen (2021) a plastic grating commonly used for walkways collides with staircase offcuts, creating a revolutionary, entirely modular space, designed for simple disassembly. Their commission for THE WORLD OF, a modular shelving unit forged from discarded red brick and a magnetic stainless plate, is installed in the agency’s offices.
