TWA’s projects include the nearly completed Dark Chalet, located on Summit Powder Mountain, for the founder of the largest independent solar power developer in the United States. This project is 362% energy positive, using breakthrough residential solar technology. Also nearly completed is the Sunset Spectacular, located on iconic Sunset Boulevard, which is a new form of digital billboard built of large prefabricated components. This project, realized in collaboration with Orange Barrel Media and MOCA, fuses architecture, media art, light, and sound into a new civic space for the 21st century. The Flat Out Large, a research project completed in 2021, takes on the housing and energy crises of Los Angeles, with a new form of urbanism based on the ecological ideas of large scale indoor-outdoor spaces, shade, adaptive re-use, and inner-city solar fields.

In 2018, TWA designed the concept for Blockchains City for Blockchains, LLC on their 67,000 acre property in Sparks, Nevada. This project envisions a new world built on blockchain technology, allowing for new forms of collaboration, sustainability, and democracy. In 2014, TWA began planning of the Main Museum of Los Angeles Art with Tom Gilmore, the developer known for leading the re-vitalization of downtown Los Angeles. This project includes 105,000 square feet of renovation and new construction beneath, inside of, and on top of several downtown historic bank buildings.

TWA’s work is part of the permanent collection of the FRAC Centre Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA San Francisco, and MoMA New York. They have received awards such as the MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architect's Award, the Architectural League Young Architect's Prize, and many AIA Design Awards, including two prestigious Honor Awards for the Sunset Spectacular (2017) and the Dark Chalet (2020). In its May 2009 issue, ICON magazine named Wiscombe one of the “top 20 architects in the world who are making the future and transforming the way we work.”

Comprehensive Building Design
We pride ourselves on our ability to synthesize complex sets of design criteria and resolve them in unexpected, creative ways. We move fluidly between programmatic layouts, structure, parking needs, phasing, advanced envelope design, active and passive MEP design, lighting, and landscape, cost estimating, and construction sequencing. While we work with outside partners for our engineering and consulting needs, we posses deep knowledge of the fundamentals of each discipline which allows us to lead, control process, and manage cost effectively.

Envelope Design
TWA is a leader in the design of complex and innovative facades in glass, aluminum and stainless panel, FRP, and composites. These allow us to create specific architectural effects while maintaining economical, sustainable, and highly functional total integration of systems. We are particularly interested in how the global construction industry allows for high-quality and cost-effective production of large pre-fabricated components, delivered to sites everywhere. This has fundamentally changed the procurement environment, and TWA is uniquely positioned to leverage its global experience in this capacity.

Planetary Energy
At TWA, energy-intelligent design is an imperative. Every project strategically connects ideas about form and space to opportunities for daylighting, natural ventilation, and carbon-neutral sources of planetary energy. Principal Tom Wiscombe’s extensive architectural experience in Europe translates into deeply integrated thinking about sustainability as a basic element of good design, and results in sophisticated, highly functional passive systems that do not intrude on the aesthetics or user experience of the realized design.

Our expertise includes planning and implementing cutting-edge energy systems, including ground-source heat exchangers, radiant heating and cooling, stack effect with night-cooling dampers, innovative radiant hydronics, and solar PV and film. We stay current in green building codes and best practices as these continue to develop internationally, as well as with the National Green Building Standards in the U.S. The Dark Chalet features a fully integrated solar system designed by TWA in conjunction with the owner, founder of the largest independent solar power developer in the United States. It involves the conversion of commercial grade solar infrastructure for residential applications to allow for breakthrough solar opportunity, ultimately resulting in a building that is 362% energy positive. Net-zero is so yesterday.

International Practice
TWA has experience with international and local planning and code authorities as well as different methods of project delivery used in the United States, Germany, Austria, France, the Middle East, Korea and China. We also have extensive experience working with Executive Architects on joint ventures in international settings, and with the Design Assist project delivery method, which brings builders in early to collaborate. Previous to the founding of TWA, Principal Tom Wiscombe had a ten-year career at Coop Himmelb(l)au, where he was both Project Partner and Chief Designer for four major projects, totaling 150,000 square meters (1.5 million square feet). The total construction value of these projects is over $750 million USD. He brings this experience to bear on the work of TWA by 'seeing around the bend', and leveraging his global professional network.

Lyon Musée des Confluences, Lyon (2001-2014)
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BMW Welt, Munich (2001-2007)
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Akron Art Museum (2001-2007)
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UFA Cinema Center, Dresden (1994-1998)
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Our method is based on “models:” three-dimensional entities that precede exposure to the contingencies of program or site and embody specific ways of seeing the universe. The models that most fascinate us are low-resolution, almost primitive figures such as jacks, stacks, crystals, ziggurats, tesseracts, objects inside objects, misfit objects, and loose-fit enclosures. Rather than being drawn from the world, these entities exist as worlds in their own right, contending with the fundamental relationship between container and contained in an intensely disciplinary way.


Ground in our work is treated as architecture rather than landscape. Our building masses do not fuse with or otherwise disappear into the ground, but remain discrete from it using strategies such as hovering, nesting, or otherwise deferring a “landing.” Entry becomes a strategy for leaping between worlds rather than a smooth transition from outside to inside.

Finally, our work attempts to move beyond general envelope logics such as panelization and toward specific figuration. Like tattoos on the body, figuration on building skins can simultaneously interact with underlying form and deviate from it, creating ambiguous scale effects and links between architectural parts. Tectonics have been identified for too long with either material phenomenology or literal expression of performance. We argue, instead, that the beauty of tectonics is its ability to create fictions, confounding expectations of material or scale.