He is the co-designer of "off-use," an award-winning studio and residence in Los Angeles (2002) that "combines the speculative discipline of modernism with the material excesses of mass culture."
While firmly contextualized within the discourse of architecture theory, the "turn" shares similarities to the idea of postcritique found in literary criticism.
Somol's most notable contribution to this discourse came via his widely-cited essay, co-authored with Sarah Whiting, "Notes Around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism," published by MIT's Perspecta journal in 2002.
[2] Observers have dubbed the essay "the true birth certificate of post-criticality," and that its thesis attempted to commit "symbolic 'patricide' on the previous generation of theorists whose discourse dominated the pages of Oppositions and Assemblage in the 1970s and 1980s.
"[3] As architectural historian Robert Cowherd describes, "Somol and Whiting proceed within the recognisable framework of theory while venturing beyond the critical autonomy of a ‘hot’ avant-garde to examine a set o f ‘cool’ projects with an eye towards their performance in solving (non-theoretical) problems in the world of everyday experience.