Archinect - News

On the comparative difficulty of family-sized apartment dwellings in North America

2024-05-24T12:04:00-04:00

One major consequence of this difference in design is that the North American double-loaded corridor buildings are much worse at providing family-sized units. To illustrate the point, we’ll go through the different sized apartments one by one, and compare the floor area and design. You’ll notice that the American plans have significantly more floor area for the same number of bedrooms, and have much more lightless interior space up against the common corridor to fill.

Stephen Smith is a former journalist and the Executive Director of the Brooklyn-based Center for Building in North America. His analysis of spatial challenges created by multifamily apartments and zoning conditions was featured recently in Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast. This is an adroit relaying of an issue affecting both developers and architects in pertaining markets and compliments an earlier 2021 report on post-pandemic trends in multifamily residential design from the website Propmodo.

Smith writes: "The merits of North American building and zoning codes can be debated, but the effect is clearly that apartments, in order to provide the same number of bedrooms and give everyone a window, must necessarily consume far more floor area than point access block designs possible in other countries. So if you’re looking for a family-sized apartment in the U.S. or Canada and finding that new buildings don’t have what you’re looking for, it’s not you, it’s not the architect, and it’s not ...

From +Pool and works for West to 'New Spaces of Justice'

2021-04-19T20:41:00-04:00

As a young architect in the 2010s she was working with clients like Kanye West, designing everything from his Parisian apartment to a seven-screen audio-visual experience...A few years later alongside Wong, she designed that iconic mountain that split in half and turned into a volcano during the Yeezus Tour in 2013.

@Lei_Takanashi profiles Oana Stănescu, who now runs her own eponymous multifaceted practice, after her and her partner Wong decided to close Family New York in 2018.

#025YEZ by Oana Stanescu & Dong-Ping Wong

h/t @LaoluRG

Architectural professionals share the emotional impacts of COVID-19

2020-03-26T13:22:00-04:00

There's no hiding the emotional toll this unprecedented pandemic has had on the entire globe. As a part of our efforts to learn about the impacts of this situation, Archinect reached out to its international community to get a sense of how things have been going. We wanted to hear how our colleagues have been holding up, discovering along the way that many of us share the same challenges, concerns, and uncertainties. As a part of our outreach, we asked how professionals were doing emotionally. Through that inquiry, we found 4 main areas of emotional impact:

Feeling distracted, drained, and anxious from news and updates
Worried about the economic implications of the pandemic
Hit to productivity and focus due to stress and anxiety
Familial concerns and impacts

We'll look at each one more in-depth and share some personal remarks from our colleagues across the industry.

Feeling distracted, drained, and anxious from news

As we learn about this novel situation together, our tendency to check ...

The pop culture-bending firm, Family New York, has decided to part ways

2018-02-08T13:36:00-05:00

Since establishing the practice in 2010, Family New York has accrued an impressive array of projects to their name, as well as fans of their work. Over the course of only eight years, founders Oana Stanescu and Dong-Ping Wong have had the opportunity to collaborate with everyone from the New Museum to Virgil Abloh and Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. During this time, the duo has engaged in fanciful projects like their proposal for a water-filtering, floating pool off the shores of New York City and their movable, 50-foot volcano for West's dazzling, Yeezus tour.

Despite this solid run, the two have decided to go their separate ways and disband the practice. According to their statement, Stanescu, who is a former top-notch Archinect School Blogger, is going on to pursue a multifaceted practice under her own name. She will also continue on with her teaching positions at Harvard GSD and Cooper Union. Wong has also decided to start his own firm, FOOD, with projects already in the works i...

It's now more common for young adults in the US to live with their parents than in any other scenario

2016-05-25T13:00:00-04:00

In that age group, 32.1 percent of people [ages 18-34] live in their parents' house, while 31.6 live with a spouse or partner in their own homes and 14 percent live alone, as single parents or in a home with roommates or renters. The rest live with another family member, a nonfamily member or in group-living situations such as a college dorm or prison. [...] the rise in the number of young adults living at home started before the economic crash — and so did the possible contributing factors.

The analysis, done by the Pew Research Center, also makes clear that this isn't the all-time high for young adults living at home – that topped out in 1940, at 35%. Still, at that time, it was more common for young adults to have shacked up with a spouse or partner.

Pew is also careful to couch the analysis in the context of other demographic developments, such as the rise of male unemployment and the fact that young adults working today make "less than they would have in their parents' day". And interestingly, as women made more, the rate of women living at home increased as well.

More on shifting residential demographics:

A Secret Language: Oana Stanescu and Dong-Ping Wong, partners at Family, on Archinect Sessions One-to-One #16

2016-03-28T14:04:00-04:00

This week on One-to-One, we check in with the partners behind Family, Oana Stanescu (former top-notch Archinect School Blogger) and Dong-Ping Wong, to hear how the pop culture-bending firm grew from when Oana and Dong met at REX, to now designing for Kanye West and pitching their own projects in New York, including the innovative + Pool project. Also, why Oana's dog is all over their website.

Listen to One-to-One #16 with Oana Stanescu and Dong-Ping Wong of Family:

iTunes: Click here to listen and subscribe to the new "Archinect Sessions One-to-One" podcast
SoundCloud: click here to follow Archinect
RSS: subscribe with any of your favorite podcasting apps via our RSS feed: http://onetoone.libsyn.com/rss
Download: this episode

Shownotes:

Oana's archived School Blog for Universitatea „Politehnica” din Timişoara

What Oana is reading:

Life Is Elsewhere, by Milan Kundera
Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Rhinoceros, by Eugène Ionesco

What Oana is listening to: Nirvana, Guns & Roses

What Dong is watching...

Oana Stanescu, the architect behind Kanye's volcano, talks to NY Times about pushing design boundaries via pop culture

2015-08-06T18:45:00-04:00

For a serious architect who has designed public housing in Dallas and a bridge in Slovenia, it may come as a surprise that Oana Stanescu’s best-known work is a 50-foot-high volcano that Kanye West ascended onstage during his grandiose Yeezus tour...Along with Dong-Ping Wong, her partner in the West Village architectural firm Family, Ms. Stanescu is making a name for herself in design circles for her ability to merge pop culture with utilitarian design.

For more Family on Archinect, you can check out Oana's archived Archinect School Blog, the +POOL, and the firm's other cool projects.

Start 'em young: teenaged son picks architect for family's house

2015-08-04T14:54:00-04:00

The family hadn’t been in New Jersey long ... and they still missed their previous home, a modernist design that Ms. Wong, in particular, had loved. So Andrew, who was then in eighth grade, suggested commissioning an architect to build a modern house. [...] “being type-A parents ... we thought maybe it would be an experience for him to work with architects and be intrinsically involved in building a house.” [...] "He was interested in design, and they empowered him.”

More teenaged architecture dreams:

Work-life balance: how one architect collaborates with his teenage son

2015-07-17T08:12:00-04:00

Sometimes, the inspiration for a single design element can be hard to pin down. Other times, it’s coming straight out of your hammy fourteen year-old kid. This is something of a regular occurrence for Hector M. Perez, a San Diego-based architect who often collaborates with his son Adrian on projects for his own firm, De-Arc.

For a small mix-use project in downtown San Diego, La Esquina (pictured above), Perez had planned identical entryways for seven lofts, until his son intervened. Worrying that tenants might come home discombobulated from a night on the town and try to enter the wrong doorway, Adrian suggested marking each entryway with its own distinct color. Hector happily accepted the critique, and adapted it into the design. A short film made by Breadtruck Films captures Adrian's sage delivery to his father, "You're not doing it right!":

Hector M. Perez // Designer from BREADTRUCK FILMS on Vimeo.

Hector himself comments in the film on the very conscious involvement of his son in ...

New housing developments geared toward grandparent-led families

2011-10-13T19:40:05-04:00

What little new housing that's being built in this country right now is being closely geared to the ways the American economy -- and its society -- are changing. Fewer sprawling suburbs. More urban living. And in Kansas City, Mo., a nod to demographics. Developers there are building homes that cater to a very specific changing family dynamic.

+ Pool Needs Your Support

2011-06-20T14:42:00-04:00

We just got news from the guys at Family and The Office of PlayLab, both young design firms in New York, who need your support for their exciting project + Pool, a floating pool in NYC that cleans the river water it sits in - like a giant strainer dropped into the river.

This project is a completely self-initiated project by the two firms. Following the completion of a preliminary engineering feasibility report done with engineers at Arup, they are now preparing to physically test and ultimately build a full-scale working prototype of a section of the pool itself. The designers just launched a 30-day Kickstarter campaign 5 days ago, already raising almost $15,000, and they could certainly use your help (and the help of your friends and their friends) to help to spread the word further.

Here's a more detailed project description of + Pool:

EVERYTHING IS BETTER WITH A POOL

+ Pool is the collaborative initiative of design studios Family and PlayLab to build a floating pool f...