As part of AN’s media partnership with The Architectural League of New York, the March/April 2026 issue of The Architect’s Newspaper features 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 just architectural design. This month each of the firms will present their work in a lecture series. Ahead of the online talks AN will roll out the firm profiles online. Next up is CO Adaptive, a Brooklyn, New York–based practice that will present its work on March 19. The full list of winners can be found here and the calendar of lectures here.
CO Adaptive was founded in 2011 by Ruth Mandl and Bobby Johnston. As its name suggests, the Brooklyn-based studio is committed to adaptive reuse, energy efficiency, circularity, maintenance, and repair. Mandl and Johnston met as graduate students at Columbia GSAPP in 2007, four years before they started their firm. Mandl, who was born in Vienna, moved to New York on a J-1 visa for an internship and later worked for Peter Eisenman. After graduate school, she joined the New York office of Richard Lewis. Johnston had positions at several small California residential firms and at Perkins&Will in San Francisco before enrolling at Columbia. “Bobby had been wanting to have his own practice ever since he was a kid,” Mandl said. “We did a couple of projects at GSAPP, so we knew we worked well together.”
After launching CO Adaptive in 2011, the married couple started small; their first project primarily entailed moving a partition wall in a New York City apartment. “We said no to nothing at first,” Mandl told AN. Johnston noted that the first CO Adaptive project that got the office publicity “and embodied our values” was a small landmarked interior renovation for a developer in Brooklyn. “The budget was really tight, so we worked [with] a lot with reclaimed material, like bowling alley flooring and exposed plumbing piping,” Johnston continued.
Sustainability is at the center of the firm’s ethos. In 2019 Mandl and Johnston pledged to discontinue using petroleum-based foam insulation. Recent projects include a 1945 row home in Astoria that CO Adaptive renovated into a certified passive house and a metal foundry in Brooklyn that the office repurposed as a theater. Mandl and Johnston likewise retrofitted a brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant into a home for themselves that is today a certified passive house. Johnston and Mandl have also served as adjunct faculty members at their alma mater Columbia GSAPP and lectured nationwide.
In 2025 CO Adaptive was selected by Material for the Arts to design a new artist studio in Long Island City using reused, donated, and salvaged materials. This year CO Adaptive was included on AN’s 2026 Twenty to Watch list, on top of its recent recognition by the Architectural League of New York. Moving forward, CO Adaptive is “getting more involved with policy and advocating for circularity in the built environment,” Mandl said. “We have 12 employees. We’re super happy with the size that we are now, but maybe we will grow. I could see us being a maximum of 20 or so. But I don’t think we’re going for growth,” she affirmed. “I think we want to scale the things that we believe in.”
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