  We devise a generic and experimentally accessible recipe to prepare boundary
states of topological or nontopological quantum systems through an interplay
between coherent Hamiltonian dynamics and local dissipation. Intuitively, our
recipe harnesses the spatial structure of boundary states which vanish on
sublattices where losses are suitably engineered. This yields unique nontrivial
steady states that populate the targeted boundary states with infinite
lifetimes while all other states are exponentially damped in time. Remarkably,
applying loss only at one boundary can yield a unique steady state localized at
the very same boundary. We detail our construction and rigorously derive full
Liouvillian spectra and dissipative gaps in the presence of a spectral mirror
symmetry for a one-dimensional Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model and a two-dimensional
Chern insulator. We outline how our recipe extends to generic noninteracting
systems.
