Daniel (Danny, DKL) Landez (he series) is a spatial designer and director whose work spans architecture, performance, exhibition design, and media. His projects rehearse how built form and embodied action structure collective experience and memory.
Landez received his Master of Architecture from Princeton University, where he also earned a certificate in Media + Modernity, and received his B.S. in Architecture and Theater Arts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For his work at Princeton, Landez was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize for “superior ability and talent throughout their architectural design studio work” and the Henry Adams AIA Medal the highest overall academic record.
Landez is currently a designer at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, contributing to exhibitions and installations for the Triennale di Milano, Venice Biennale, Fondation Cartier, the Louvre, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Performa, MAXXI, and the Power Station of Art. He is a member of the queer space working group.
Central to Landez’s practice is an engagement with queer temporality, sites of memory, and hauntology. Influenced by queer of color critique and deconstructivism, he approaches liveness as a reproductive practice, treating architecture as iterative and time-based rather than fixed. His work resists disappearance by attending to the persistence of ephemera as evidence. Here, memory and haunting operate not as nostalgia but as techniques for unsettling disciplinary conventions from within.
Working simultaneously across architecture and theater, Landez develops projects that move between temporal and spatial scales. Through this interdisciplinary approach to spatial production, his practice exposes the constructed conventions which organize space and embodiment. Landez’s work produces and reproduces spatialized life-practices that insist on collective survival in the face of socially constituted premature death.