Archinect - Features

'As a Black Architecture Firm, We Cannot Ignore the Fact That We Are Rare': A Conversation with Think Wilder Architecture

2023-02-24T08:15:00-05:00

Architecture licensure and running a practice are topics widely discussed on Archinect. While everyone's path is different the experiences of firm leaders, regardless of their firm size, offer a look into the realities of being an architect, leader, and entrepreneur.

"Having my own practice has allowed me to use the business as a platform to create more than just architecture. I think architects have skill sets that transcend architecture." These are the words of Stephen Wilder, Principal of Think Wilder Architecture. The Howard University and Carnegie Mellon University graduate runs a New Jersey/New York-based architecture practice that's keen on balancing work expectations while showcasing the value architects provide to their communities.

For our latest installment of Archinect's Studio Snapshots, we chat with Wilder on his path to architecture, the obstacles of licensure, challenging the industry's work culture, and how he defines the role of an architect.

Private Interests and the Public Good: Could an Office of Public Space Management Fix New York’s Chaotic and Unfriendly Public Realm?

2021-08-12T09:00:00-04:00

Cities express the tension between private interests and the common good, between buildings and public space. New York, the most populous city in the US, enjoys an abundance of impressive, exclusive structures (and quite a few impressive public ones, most of them built in the mid-20th century) while lacking high-quality, accessible open space.

This is despite a stock of undervalued public space: streets.

Hudson Yards’ Vessel Is a Sinking Ship; When Developers Fail To Listen, Tragedy Casts a Long Shadow

2021-08-01T08:10:00-04:00

It's been called many names and has been an easy target for endless jokes and memes. Yet beyond its position as both spectacle and superfluous structure, the infamous Vessel of Hudson Yards may be facing closure for good.

It's disheartening to know that this is another Vessel-related loss that our editorial team has covered. On May 27, Archinect reported the reopening after its closure in January 2021 due to three suicides at the site, happening all within 15 months. In its attempts to prevent future losses, the reopening's intended focus on suicide prevention was accompanied by a new set of safety measures. However, despite the added staffing, security, buddy system for entry, and signage providing reminders and resources regarding mental health, it appears those new protocols were not enough.

Beyond the Street: ODA Proposes a Zoning Regulation To Expand the Public Space in New York

2021-07-24T09:00:00-04:00

ODA has released a new video advertising Beyond the Street, which promises to hack New York’s infamously rigid gridiron to unlock hidden courtyards New Yorkers never knew they were missing. The proposal, which has no official client, aims to create new privately owned public space by opening the interior of city blocks to pedestrians and street-level retail.

The speculative project by the New York-based firm is being promoted through a glossy animation depicting the potential change to Manhattan’s Flower District, where the architects keep an office space.

Trashing the Community-Backed BIG U: East Side Coastal Resilience Moves Forward Despite Local Opposition. Will NYC Miss Another Opportunity to Lead on Climate and Environmental Justice?

2021-07-13T08:28:00-04:00

In late October 2012, Superstorm Sandy crashed into the East Coast. Causing more than $70 billion in damage, the storm ripped buildings from their foundations and flooded streets. In New York City, the hard concrete edge that separates Lower Manhattan from the East River was breached, filling the FDR expressway with brackish water and short-circuiting ConEdison’s 14th Street Substation, causing the much-circulated image of a near-total blackout in all points south. With the freeway flooded and the Lower East Side dark, this unprecedented damage came to represent the vulnerability of coastal infrastructure.

People Over Cars: What does it mean to pedestrianize a quarter of NYC streets?

2021-03-23T10:34:00-04:00

Over the past year, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, urban life has been transformed. This seems especially true in New York where the pressure of the lockdown was released in a burst with last summer’s uprising against racialized police violence in May and June. With people anxious to spend more time outside, the city launched a series of programs including Open Restaurants and Open Streets. Intending to buoy the struggling foodservice industry and alleviate crowding in New York’s congested public spaces, with the stroke of the Mayor’s pen, restaurants could construct semi-enclosed structures—little cabanas—atop once-precious street parking, and city officials deployed temporary wooden barriers—essentially saw horses—at intersections to create new pedestrianized corridors. Overnight, New Yorkers could dine out in sheltered sidewalk cafes and stroll car-free lanes.

Michael K Chen Architecture on the Power of Social Value and Collaboration

2021-03-09T09:00:00-05:00

Michael K Chen Architecture is a seven-piece, New York-based design practice whose exuberant sense of creativity playfully blends the boundaries between architecture, interior and product design while avoiding expected style labels.

But for Chen, as he tells us in our latest Studio Snapshot, his firm's dedication is about more than just well-designed client projects: as a co-founder of the nonprofit Design Advocates, he helped connect independent design teams with NYC public schools, small businesses, and organizations in underserved communities to facilitate pro-bono collaborations during the pandemic-induced economic downturn.

Leroy Street Studio on Engaged and Inclusive Design

2020-09-21T13:14:00-04:00

For New York City-based firm Leroy Street Studio, good design is just one part of the architectural equation. Uniting several, integrated branches under one roof—architecture, community workshop, construction, and interiors—the terms 'multidisciplinary' and 'collaborative' aren't just marketing buzzwords but core values.

For the latest Studio Snapshot, Archinect reached out to LSS partners Marc Turkel, Morgan Hare, and Shawn Watts to learn more about the firm's growth process, integration of disciplines, and community outreach.

Curtis & Ginsberg on Growing a Firm During a Pandemic

2020-09-15T12:18:00-04:00

New York City-based Curtis + Ginsberg Architects have a long track record of delivering a wide range of project types for public and private sector clients, particularly within the realm of affordable housing design. Founded in 1990 by Darby Curtis, AIA, and Mark Ginsberg, FAIA, the 42-person firm has worked methodically to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic by instituting sweeping work-from-home policies for the office while also adapting its physical spaces for socially distant use.

For the latest Studio Snapshot, Archinect caught up with Curtis and Ginsberg to learn more about how the firm has fared over the last six months, how it is approaching attracting new projects, and what lies ahead for the practice.

Parsons M.Arch Graduate Tommy Yang Converts New York City's Train Stations into "Nuanced-Topias"

2020-08-28T13:51:00-04:00

With New York City's train stations as the backdrop of his thesis, Parsons School of Design M.Arch graduate Tommy Yang explores architectural narratives embedded in built environment to develop The Nuanced-Topia: Insurgent Frameworks for Storytelling. According to Yang, "My thesis manifests as an assembly that hinges on spaces of opportunities engulfing the existing train structure, creating spaces for the day-to-day actors. It is a fable between existing sites and their artifacts of process, deriving from the clash of the urban grids and intersection of transportation arteries."

Archinect connected with Yang to learn about his thesis, how he transitioned during a time of remote learning, and what it means to be an M.Arch graduate during a pandemic. Yang's thesis project is the recipient of the Alpha Ro Chi Medal 2020 for Design Excellence and NYCxDESIGN Architecture Graduates Showcase.

Archinect's Spotlight on 2020 Thesis Projects: 2020 has been an extraordinarily challenging year ...

In Focus: Creating Spatial Sensibility and Cinematic Narratives With Kevin Scott

2020-02-07T14:35:00-05:00

In Focus is Archinect's recurring series dedicated to profiling the photographers who help capture architecture and who make the work of architects look that much better. In this series, we ask: What is their relationship to architecture? How do they work? What equipment do they use? What are their goals when capturing buildings? And is there such thing as the perfect photo?

For this installment, Archinect chats with London and New York-based photographer Kevin Scott. With his experience as a trained architect, Scott uses his keen eye and spatial sensibility to capture some of the most mesmerizing photographs. Working with an esteemed list of architecture firms such as Rojkind Arquitectos, Zaha Hadid Architects, MAD Architecture, and Olson Kundig Architects, Scott has established himself as a photographer with a penchant for exhibiting cinematic beauty and compelling narratives.

His enthusiasm for the work and dedication to the craft of photography is something that doesn't easily g...

Urban Archive Opens a New Door for Digital Architectural Archives

2020-01-17T14:52:00-05:00

Historical archives and repositories are notorious for holding endless amounts of data and information of the built environment while struggling with offering public accessibility and access. The team at Urban Archive, a non-profit technology app, aims to merge passions for history, architecture, technology, and preservation to create a platform that enables others to not only learn about, but also experience the built environment in a whole new way.

Powered by a diverse team of professionals that includes preservationists, urbanists, coders, and museum specialists, Urban Archive has spent the past three years creating a new face for historical building archives. According to team member Sam Addeo, "This blend of technology, institutional buy-in, and data allows architects and students to trace contemporary debates over development and urban policy (including topics like gentrification, housing, and transit access) back to the records themselves." Archinect connected the multidisci...

Worrell Yeung On Perfecting The Art Of A Long-Game Architecture Practice

2019-12-05T11:27:00-05:00

There are many reasons for architects to start their own practice, and often, it's no easy task. As New York City-based architects Max Worrell and Jejon Yeung explain, "there's no road map or set course" for architects to follow. However, it's this level of ambiguity that is both daunting and exciting for the pair and their eponymous practice, Worrell Yeung. After spending 10 years working for firms in New York, Worrell and Yeung took the leap towards establishing their studio in 2014.

Since then, the duo has established themselves as a formidable force in residential, public, and commercial design. When running their practice, work/life balance and collaboration is critical. The two express, "it isn't a business or profession quite like a start-up where we are looking to grow quickly and sell the firm. Instead, building an architecture practice is a slow process, but one where we can shape and craft what our firm is."

For this week's Studio Snapshot, Archinect connected with Worre...

A Conversation With the Architect Who Is Bringing the World's Iconic Buildings to the Chessboard

2019-11-26T07:42:00-05:00

Trained architects turning their hand to product design is not a new phenomenon. In the 21st century Sam Jacob Studio is producing t-shirts and Zaha Hadid Architects are producing everything from vases to shoes, at the turn of the previous century architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh was designing clocks. It is common for architects diversify into other careers, as polymathic architecture education fosters a wide variety of skills.

Abruzzo Bodziak Architects Embraces the Beautiful Complexities of Architectural Practice Through Optimism and Narration

2019-11-01T15:45:00-04:00

What happens if running a practice can be viewed as one long project? With this perspective and approach to establishing themselves as a formidable architecture studio, the Brooklyn-based duo of Abruzzo Bodziak Architects has continued to make their design imprint within the fabric of New York's diverse design community.

As practicing architects and academics involved in teaching and fellowship, Emily Abruzzo and Gerald Bodziak use their multidisciplinary approach to design solutions that work toward a built environment which "engenders belonging."

For this week's Studio Snapshot, Archinect connected with Abruzzo and Bodziak to learn more about their journey as a budding architectural practice and showcasing the "synthetic process" of the built form through narrative.

Peterson Rich Office: Rethinking The Value (and Values) of a Small Architecture Practice

2019-10-24T06:00:00-04:00

Peterson Rich Office (PRO) is a New York City-based architecture and design practice that pursues cultural and residential projects with an inventive and joyful spirit.

The young firm, founded by Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich in Brooklyn in 2012, was awarded a New Practice New York prize by the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter in 2018. Over the years, PRO has steadily produced provocative and challenging proposals that interrogate how finance, form, and use interrelate at the urban scale. Whether crafting a secluded artists' studio, mixed-use towers, or proposals for maximizing the land adjacent to public housing projects, the firm manages to think-through and sometimes entirely re-think the role architects can play in bringing transformative projects to life.

For this week's Studio Snapshot, Archinect was able to connect with Peterson and Rich to discuss, among other topics, how architects represent but one part of a "massive network of stakeholders for any bui...

Garrick Jones of Ten to One on How to Fold Pro Bono Work Into Your Business Model

2019-04-15T13:32:00-04:00

In only six years, Ten to One Architectural Design Studio has built up an impressively high volume of projects, many of which are offered up as pro bono services. Working across a diverse range of budgets, scales and types, the New York-based firm is motivated by a commitment to public architecture, and bringing design equity to underserved communities—an aim that was further codified after the 2016 election, the firm's founder Garrick Jones says.

While providing free architectural services can be tough, especially for a small firm, the benefits are worthwhile. In this week's Studio Snapshot, we talk with Jones about how him and his team of four manage to make it work.

'It's Not Corporate Architecture!' Insist David Bench and Jonathan Chesley, the Duo Behind the NYC-based INC_A

2019-03-18T10:00:00-04:00

In 2016, the Storefront for Art and Architecture held an unusual design competition asking architects to compete for the most creative way to tear down a building. The brief had come out of a prior competition, the New York non-profit's 'Competition of Competitions', in which David Bench and Jonathan Chesley proposed the idea for a dream-up demolition competition.

At the time, the two were beginning to form their own studio, born out of lunchtime chatter with one another in Union Square Park. Now, the New York-based INC_A (which stands for 'It’s Not Corporate Architecture') is busy growing as a design firm, working on a number of public and semi-public projects. For this week's Studio Snapshot, we talk with Bench and Chesley about their radical proposals and many evolutions as a practice.

Simple, Playful, Ambitious; A conversation with Benjamin Cadena on his journey to finding his voice in architecture.

2018-12-31T18:01:00-05:00

His intuitive approach to architecture can be summed up by his playfully ambitious works that not only showcase his talents as a designer, but as an innovator in the field of architecture. Pulling from his influential upbringing in Bogotá, Cadena's use of simplistic forms and color has allowed him to shape his own voice and approach to design.

As we wrap up 2018, we welcome the New Year with this week's Studio Snapshot on an architect whose passion for community and dialogue inspires him and his creative practice. Benjamin Cadena, of Studio Cadena, talks freedom in architecture, the joys of model making, and color's association with habitation.

An American Palazzo in Greenwich Village; The Headquarters of the National Maritime Union by Albert C. Ledner

2018-12-26T17:47:00-05:00

Callouts is a review series in praise of architecture, art, and the city.

Contrary to the common use of the modal verb “to call out” which emphasizes negative criticism, “Callouts” here draw from the architectural drawing tradition. Callouts in architecture establish a closer look towards a part of a project that requires more explanation and emphasized attention due to its complexity, uniqueness or typicality. They create a different, more detailed view of what has already been seen, expanding the reader’s understanding of the project.

Following that tradition, “Callouts” is a series of carefully selected complex, unique and banal projects, that have the potential to initiate a discussion, be didactic and affect their contemporary contextual mythology. Reviews for projects that do not satisfy these criteria can be found by typing “architecture” on your search bar.

New York's Dynamic Duo, Hou De Sousa, Blends Their Passion for Detail and Spatial Adaptability Into Beautifully Composed Projects

2018-12-18T12:05:00-05:00

After graduating architecture school, Nancy Hou and Josh de Sousa knew right away they wanted to start their own practice. After gaining experience by working for notable design offices, the two strived to create a practice which fed their appetite for creative freedom. Their attention to detail, and passion for building with a sense of purpose and camaraderie, has the firm quickly becoming a catalyst for designs that incite human interaction.

For this week's Studio Snapshot, Nancy and Josh talk about the joys of cultivating a creative environment, and how starting their practice twice lead to a deeper understanding of the work they wanted to produce.

#ArchinectMeets @mmmosarchitects

2018-12-18T12:00:00-05:00

#ArchinectMeets is a series of interviews with members of the architecture community that use Instagram as a creative medium. With the series, we ask some of Instagram’s architectural photographers, producers and curators about their relationship to the social media platform and how it has affected their practice.

Social media has undeniably affected the way we perceive, interpret and share opinions about architecture today. While we use our own account, @Archinect, as a site for image curation and news content, we wanted to ask fellow Instagram users how they navigated the platform.

We spoke to MOS Architects about their Instagram, @mmmosarchitects. For the New York firm, Instagram is less a tool for self-promotion than a way of killing time in between important moments. Their Instagram, to put it simply, allows them to reveal glimpses into their lives, both in the office and outside of it, as earnestly as an architecture firm can.

The Architecture Collective KnitKnot Shows Us the Possibilities of Practice in a Hypermobile World

2018-10-16T10:15:00-04:00

KnitKnot Architecture is an international collective born out of a competition entry. The team of architects, urban planners, artists and thinkers operate on a role-based structure, constantly adapting to meet the specificities of a given project.

Though spread across the globe, the group recently moved their offices into the GSAPP Incubator at NEW INC, Columbia University's launchpad for entrepreneurship and expanded modes of practice. Beyond serving as the physical office for its members in New York, the group hopes the new digs will bring about new ways of rethinking their practice. Here, the team talks about how they met, the recent move, and their unique working methodology.

How One Architecture Remains Small While Working on Massive Urban Resiliency Projects

2018-01-22T09:00:00-05:00

Matthijs Bouw is a Dutch architect and urbanist and founder of One Architecture, an award-winning design and planning firm that was established in Amsterdam in 1995 and again in New York in 2015 after the firm won the Rebuild by Design competition in partnership with BIG. Bouw is also the Rockefeller Urban Resilience Fellow for PennDesign at the University of Pennsylvania, where his work centers on urban resilience and water management projects.

For this week's Small Studio Snapshots, we talk with Bouw about opening up his New York office, the difference between working in the Netherlands versus the United States, and the benefits of keeping a small team despite working on large-scale projects.

Starting an Architecture Firm in Two Cities Simultaneously; A Small Studio Snapshot of EL Studio

2018-01-16T12:14:00-05:00

EL Studio, a practice based partially out of Washington D.C, is located in a former horse stable that has been converted into a live/work space by co-founder Mark Lawrence and his wife. Along with his business partner Elizabeth Emerson (who leads their New York office), the two have grown their practice into an award-winning architecture firm that specializes in building finely-crafted, innovative structures within challenging constraints.

For this week's Small Studio Snapshot, we talk with the two about the practice's origins, their unique office space, and some projects they are currently working on.

Removing the Scaffolding of Architecture

2018-01-03T12:36:00-05:00

When I think of architecture I think of the Salk Institute in La Jolla by Louis Kahn, Fallingwater in Pennsylvania by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Florence Cathedral by Brunelleschi, The Yamanashi building in Kofu by Kenzo Tange... there are so many great buildings by so many great architects.

The Founders of NY-based New Affiliates Discuss How Their Love for Arguing Betters Their Work

2017-09-18T12:12:00-04:00

N/A, our latest Small Studio Snapshot, is a New York-based architectural design practice led by Jaffer Kolb and Ivi Diamantopoulou. They are interested in using known forms, techniques and materials in new ways; creating work that is both textured and layered, typical and novel. Current projects of the firm include a house completing this fall, a hotel facade renovation, a cliffside viewing platform, and a collection of design objects.

There Are Over a Thousand 9/11 Memorials Around the World. Here Are Just a Few You Probably Haven't Seen.

2017-09-11T12:22:00-04:00

I spent more than five years studying entries to the 2003 World Trade Center Memorial Design Competition, compiling them in my book “9/11 Memorial Visions” (McFarland & Co, 2016). Soon after, I learned that the New York City memorial is only one of many, and I thought, “There must be some interesting ones that have been built…”

A(n) Office conceive of their small architectural studio like a publication

2017-07-31T12:00:00-04:00

Mitch McEwen and Marcelo López-Dinard, of A(n) Office, explore the intersection of architecture and exhibition, conceiving their New York and Detroit based studio, A(n) Office, as a publication of sorts.

In Focus: Leonardo Mascaro

2017-07-06T16:00:00-04:00

In Focus is Archinect's recurring series dedicated to profiling the photographers who help make the work of architects look that much better. What has attracted them to architecture? How do they work? What type of equipment do they use? What do they think about seeing their work in blogs?

For this installment, we interviewed the NYC-based photographer Leonardo Mascaro.