“Home reflects character. More, it moulds character. Home is the image of thought, exposed, inviting the gaze of the world. As your home is, so are you.” 

— Home Owners’ financing brochure, 1920

OJT is an architecture and urban design studio based in New Orleans. Founded in 2011 by Jonathan Tate, the firm has designed and developed projects throughout the United States including single and multi-unit housing, hospitality, office space, education, transit and architectural planning, and cultural work. As a complement to OJT’s commissioned projects, the studio incorporates a fair amount of research and speculative investigation into the workflow of the practice. This tends to take the form of broad studies of conditions that either propel a concept or observation that is central to a particular work or, in some cases, initiate new projects altogether. The connection between design and affordability is an integral component of the studio’s research agenda and has been explored through the Starter Home* program which speculates the future of home ownership in America. The “starter home,” as a type, has developed according to a series of metrics, each of which has had its major moment of relevance as new ideologies and technologies effect change on the domestic landscape. Whatever their differences, starter homes share a mutual genesis as responses to a need for housing, the desire to attract new consumers to the housing market and the economy at large, and often, an attraction on the part of the designer, planner, and/or architect to propose new models of domestic inhabitation. OJT’s work has received numerous awards including the 2020 American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award and multiple AIA National Awards.