Archinect - Features

S9 Architecture is Remaking the City and Suburbs Through Iterative Design

2017-05-02T12:14:00-04:00

S9 Architecture, a Manhattan-based firm, is involved in a plethora of projects that are not so much shaping the skyline of the city as quietly addressing the context of the city and the impacts of new spatial needs from the street and human scale. Their work has even attracted the likes of ‘starchitect’ Bjarke Ingels, who recently moved into a rustic, rusted penthouse in one of their Brooklyn buildings. A relatively young firm, S9 has a style and philosophy that has helped them secure a position at the forefront of a new market for vibrant mixed-use development in New York and its surroundings, with projects like the Dock 72 building in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard under construction—which has WeWork as a major tenant—to iterations on reviving and adapting the shopping experience in suburbia.

Using algorithms to disrupt suburbia's monotonous designs

2016-10-13T12:22:00-04:00

“Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same,” Malvina Reynolds sang in 1962, forty-three years before her verses served as the theme music for the TV show Weeds. The song still resonates because, despite formal changes, suburban developments have, for some, represented monotony and homogeneity since they were first constructed in the late 1920s. But who said that mass-produced housing has to be boring?

Screen/Print #18: "New SubUrbanisms" by Judith K. De Jong

2014-06-09T10:16:00-04:00

The American suburbs no longer exist as physically and conceptually peripheral to the downtown, the central consciousness of urban development. According to Judith K. De Jong’s new book, New SubUrbanisms, the suburbs' mainstream designation as places of seclusion, domesticity, superficiality, and safety (set in comparison to their accompanying denser urban downtowns), has collapsed in the wake of a feedback loop between central city and suburbia.