As part of AN’s media partnership with The Architectural League of New York City, the March/April 2026 issue of The Architect’s Newspaperfeatures profiles of the League’s eight Emerging Voices winners. The biennial award recognizes the work of practices in the United States, Canada, and Mexico with distinct design voices that focus on work beyond simply architectural design. This month each of the firms will present their work in a lecture series. Ahead of the online talks AN will present the firm profiles online. Next up is CO Adaptive, a Brooklyn, New York– based practice that will present its work on March 19. The complete list of winners can be found here and the calendar of lectures here.
CO Adaptive was established in 2011 by Ruth Mandl and Bobby Johnston. As its name recommends, the Brooklyn-based studio is devoted to adaptive reuse, energy effectiveness, circularity, maintenance, and repair work. Mandl and Johnston met as graduate students at Columbia GSAPP in 2007, 4 years before they started their company. Mandl, who was born in Vienna, moved to New york city on a J-1 visa for an internship and later on worked for Peter Eisenman. After graduate school, she signed up with the New york city workplace of Richard Lewis. Johnston had positions at a number of small California property firms and at Perkins & Will in San Francisco before registering at Columbia. “Bobby had actually been wishing to have his own practice ever since he was a kid,” Mandl stated. “We did a number of jobs at GSAPP, so we knew we worked well together.”
< img src ="https://www.archpaper.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/CO-Adaptive_MFTA_01.jpg"alt="studio for Materials for the Arts'artist residency program by co adaptive"width= "2048"/ > A studio for Materials for the Arts’artist residency program (Hanna Grankvist) After launching CO Adaptive in 2011, the married couple started little; their very first project mainly involved moving a partition wall in a New York City house. “We stated no to absolutely nothing in the beginning,” Mandl told AN. Johnston kept in mind that the first CO Adaptive task that got the workplace promotion “and embodied our worths” was a little landmarked interior renovation for a designer in Brooklyn. “The budget was truly tight, so we worked [with] a lot with recovered material, like bowling alley flooring and exposed pipes piping,” Johnston continued.