Archinect - News

SO – IL and OSD to overhaul Detroit marina for new waterfront district

2024-04-30T11:45:00-04:00

SO – IL and OSD have designed a new waterfront district for Detroit’s Little Village. The marina overhaul, named Stanton Yards, will see the existing storage and service-based site transformed into a 13-acre cultural destination with 80,000 square feet of commercial and creative space, 85 boat slips, and waterfront parks.

Image credit: bloomimages

SO – IL will lead the adaptive reuse of four existing pre-war industrial buildings, which historically housed a former theater, marina showrooms, service ships, and a navy shipyard used during World War II. Select demolition and the addition of “unifying elements and upgrades to accessibility” will create a campus for arts organizations, retail, artist studios, and hospitality.

Image credit: bloomimages

“The ethos that 'new ideas must use old buildings' guides our transformation of Stanton Yards into a thriving, multifaceted community,” said Florian Idenburg, Co-founding Principal of SO – IL, about the scheme. “Our design ingrains four histo...

SO – IL creates 3D knit textile passage for Bruges Triennial 2024

2024-04-22T11:39:00-04:00

SO – IL has completed a passage of 3D knit textiles as part of the 2024 Bruges Triennial in Belgium.

Titled 'Common Thread,' the passage is inspired by the medieval city’s lace-making tradition, using an innovative woven fabric to create what the team calls an “intricate spatial experience in a wave-like tunnel.”

Image credit: Iwan Baan

The installation is set within a passageway that connects the secluded courtyard of a 19th-century monastery with the wider city. In collaboration with a team from TU Delft, the team explored how Common Thread could marry the tradition of the bobbin lace with modern technologies and new geometric possibilities.

Image credit: Iwan Baan

The resulting fabric is knit in varying ratios, with individual threads combining and diverging in ever-changing patterns. The installation’s form and structural framework were further guided by computational simulations and material samples.

Image credit: Iwan Baan

Image cre...

SO – IL presents designs for their new Williams College Museum of Art expansion

2024-03-08T13:48:00-05:00

SO – IL’s plans for an extension of the Williams College Museum of Art in western Massachusetts have been made public as the institution prepares to house its important collection in a free-standing and purpose-built new home for the first time in its 100-year history.

The project will enhance the museum’s mission as an on-campus educational resource while creating a new gateway between the college and the community of Williamstown.

SO – IL says they envision their plan to culminate in 2027. When it does, the project will yield a total of 15,000 square feet worth of new gallery spaces in a three-story structure that houses a 6,400-square-foot study center, auditorium, art studios, and a café. Reed Hilderbrand will be included to complete the project's landscaping. The project was announced in 2021 following a two-year programming study that was made in consultation with TenBerke through the pandemic.

Image credit: Jeudi.Wang, courtesy SO–IL and the Williams College Museum of Art

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SO – IL becomes the latest architecture firm to achieve B Corp certification

2023-05-05T14:04:00-04:00

Brooklyn-based SO – IL has announced that it has attained B Corp certification. SO – IL is one of 69 B Corporation architecture firms certified across the U.S., and 167 worldwide, recognizing businesses that balance financial success with positive social and environmental impact.

“We are proud to be one of them allowing for company structures built around transparency, accountability, and inclusion,” SO – IL said when announcing the news. “We will continuously strive to do better and use business as a force for the good.”

The B Corp certification is conferred by the nonprofit B Lab, which assesses companies based on standards of transparency, accountability, and performance. The B Corp framework encourages organizations to prioritize the welfare of all stakeholders, including employees, the community, and the environment, rather than solely focusing on maximizing profits for shareholders.

“As leaders in the movement for economic systems change, B Corps reap remarkable benefits,” ...

SO – IL will design a new building for the vaunted Williams College Museum of Art

2022-06-03T08:50:00-04:00

One of the leading academic art museums in the country has announced SO – IL will head a new expansion effort that will deliver the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) with the first stand-alone structure in the institution’s storied history.

Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu’s team is now tasked with the tremendous opportunity to develop a concept design for a new structure that will provide upgrade facilities to the museum’s collection, which has been housed since its inception in historic Lawrence Hall. A renovation of the existing building is being explored as well.

The partners referred to it as a “project the brings together our passion for the arts with our commitment to education.” They will look to build upon a cultural portfolio that includes UC Davis’ Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art and the award-winning new Amant Art Campus in Brooklyn and promise the new construction “wi...

SO – IL and Hassell's Melbourne Arts Precinct master plan is moving forward after gaining approval

2022-03-15T18:56:00-04:00

The official go-ahead has been given to the master plan by SO – IL and Hassell for what would be one of Australia’s largest redevelopment schemes in recent memory following a decision late last week by the state of Victoria’s planning minister Richard Wynne.

Popular Australian daily The Age is reporting that the $1.7 billion Melbourne Arts Precinct effort, which has drawn its fair share of detractors from within Melbourne’s arts community, is set to move forward with the plan from the Brooklyn-based firm and its Australian partner that includes a garden pathway and heavily-cantilevered new 60-meter (196-foot) tall contemporary art gallery dubbed the NGVC.

Victoria’s planning council had previously warned of hazards, including possible wind tunnels and the various risks created for pedestrians by the gallery’s five-meter cantilever, which hangs over the abutting Kavanagh Street and Southbank Boulevard. Melbourne city councilor Rohan Leppert called the project “spectacular” but said t...

Frida Escobedo has replaced David Chipperfield on the Met's $500 million modern and contemporary wing expansion

2022-03-14T14:56:00-04:00

Change at the top of the museum world as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced Mexican architect Frida Escobedo as its new designer of the forthcoming Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing for modern and contemporary art.

Escobedo now officially replaces David Chipperfield, who had been selected by then-director Thomas Campbell in 2015. An announcement from the museum noted that the new wing will encompass some 80,000 square feet of more accessible galleries and public space all made possible by the Tang’s contribution to the nearly $500 million total cost.

The 42-year-old’s work has thus far been defined most notably by her 2018 design for the Serpentine Pavilion and through her eponymous Mexico City-based practice, which has authored a wide range of projects that include everything from historic renovation of an iconic hotel in Acapulco to investigations into the lives of domestic workers in Mexico City, among other standout projects. Escobedo has held teaching ...

Dream the Combine, Germane Barnes, Nina Cooke John, Design Earth, and SO – IL among winners of the 2022 USA Fellowship

2022-01-26T14:51:00-05:00

The United States Artists (USA) Fellowship is a program that celebrates the work of artists and their "essential role in society." Across ten disciplines ranging from architecture and design (A&D) to craft, media, and film, 63 artists were inducted into this year's fellowship cohort.

The 2022 USA Fellows representing the discipline of architecture and design are Tom Carruthers and Jennifer Newsom of Dream The Combine, Germane Barnes of Studio Barnes, Nina Cooke John of Studio Cooke John, Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy of Design Earth, and Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg of SO – IL.

Each design practice has produced notable works and made important contributions to the architecture and design community. From academia to the arts, civic engagement, and professional practice, this year's selected winners represent the future of industry changemakers. This group of 2022 Fellows joins the likes of past A&D fellows such as Theaster Gates, Jennifer Bonner, Walter Hood, Olalekan Jeyifous, M...

SO – IL's newest residential complex offers Brooklynites a 'new way of living'

2021-08-09T15:25:00-04:00

Sales are underway for units in the new SO – IL-designed 450 Warren in Brooklyn following a detailed construction period that topped out last fall.

Touting a “new way of living,” the 18 unit private residential development transforms the city into nature. Gowanus’ first-of-its-kind balanced community offers inhabitants refreshing views and an array of eco-friendly amenities surrounded by courtyard gardens in the heart of one of the borough’s most artistic neighborhoods.

Image courtesy of SO – IL

Developer Tankhouse announced the plan in the spring of 2019. The residences will feature an open kitchen plan, private foyer entryways, and oversized windows in an intimate layout connected to a central rooftop atrium via a series of bridges and hallways that give users added freedom of movement around the five-story building.

Image courtesy of SO – IL

Per the architect: “The materiality of 450 Warren is like nothing ever seen in New York City construction. 50,000 green-hued terrazzo-groun...

SO-IL unveils photos of social housing project in Mexico

2020-09-03T13:04:00-04:00

New York City-based SO-IL has nearly completed work on the six-story Las Americas social housing project in León, Mexico that aims to offer a new "prototype for the development of vertical dwellings" in the city.

The project, created in partnership with Imuvi Development and the City of León, aims to counter the ubiquitous, sprawling detached, single-family social housing communities that have taken root across the country in recent years.

As construction on the project continues, SO-IL has unveiled photos taken by Iwan Baan on its Instagram page highlighting the structure.

The architects aim to do this by introducing vertically stacked condominium units to the city's social housing efforts in order to create a marriage between existing affordability and ownership models. Describing the project, the architects write, "Resonant of the traditional home’s sense of privacy, no two units face one another. Units are arranged in a single-loaded corridor to face the courtyard and provide...

SO – IL's Florian Idenburg pens an op-ed opposing the boarding-up of museums

2020-07-06T18:13:00-04:00

Rather than fancy restaurants and gimmicky stores, lobbies could host outside organizations to convene and organize. The museum might act as a partner and participant, catalyst, and amplifier. Here, there are no bananas stuck to the wall, but ample meaningful information for an active audience. Guards would protect patrons over property. And during the next protest, lobbies could open up and transform into staging grounds, sanctuary spaces, and broadcasting stations for citizen journalists.

Architect Florian Idenburg offers alternative uses for boarded up museum fronts in New York City during the social uprising and protests and questions the corporate policies now running the museum's public interface on city's sidewalks.

"Amid the stream of information about systemic racism and demands for societal change filling my Instagram feed, a recent series of posts by my friend Lucie Rebeyrol stood out. She shared images of the glass-enclosed lobbies of three leading New York City museums—the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New Museum—hermetically boarded up with countless sheets of plywood."

Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Portugal reopens with new SO-IL-designed architectural intervention and exhibition

2020-06-15T11:30:00-04:00

After a delayed opening originally scheduled for March 27th, the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (maat) has begun its new chapter with a museum-wide architectural intervention designed by New York-based studio SO - IL.

Titled Beeline, the project is an ephemeral work that transforms the Amanda Levete-designed building into a series of spatial encounters that take guests through elevated pathways, stage areas, and workshop zones. "This not only transforms the way visitors enter and experience maat, but also challenges the implied hierarchies of spaces in a traditional museum and provide flexibility for an ever-evolving organization," said SO - IL co-founder Florian Idenburg in a statement.

The design studio also designed an exhibition for the museum called Currents - Temporary Architectures, in which the practice displays 12 projects it has created over the past decade, exploring both temporary and built works. The exhibit includes 1:1 mock-ups, ephemera, models, and books...

SO-IL's new museum for UC Davis: "a building to boost your faith in the future of American architecture"

2016-12-08T13:28:00-05:00

The museum is not a singular or path-breaking work of architecture; its design goals have more to do with manipulating light and shadow and with physical substance [...] Yet taken as a whole the museum offers a range of encouraging signs about the priorities of architecture’s up-and-coming generation. These include a genuine interest in shifting definitions of public space in a digital age and — most important of all — a preference for measured and layered effects over operatic ones.

UC Davis' new Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of art opened in November, and will function as a teaching museum with spaces for studios, galleries, and classrooms, including a courtyard for performances and installations.

According to Hawthorne, SO-IL's design (done in collaboration Karl Backus of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, an SF-based firm known for its multiple Apple stores), "flows primarily from [SO-IL leaders] Idenburg, 42, and Liu, 37, whose work tends to be porous and substantial at the same time, with cubic forms often cloaked or veiled by snug, semi-transparent skins." Hawthorne also refers back to SO-IL's YAP-winning "Pole Dance", as a tone-setter for the firm's aesthetic.

Check out Iwan Baan's photos of the museum below.

Get the backsotry on SO-IL and the Shrem museum here:

SO-IL and Gensler to design creative cultural incubator for New Museum

2013-11-01T18:06:00-04:00

The New Museum will be opening an incubator for art, technology, and design next summer in the institution's adjacent building at 231 Bowery in New York. SO-IL architects in collaboration with Gensler will design the new 11,000 sq.foot facility, which will be located inside a 19th-century structure that formerly belonged to artists like James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann.

Developed by Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum and Deputy Developer Karen Wong, the incubator will serve as a collaborative platform of shared educational and professional workspace for more than 60 start-up companies and creative entrepreneurs. The project is the latest addition to program series that aims to challenge the boundaries and relevance of museum practice in the 21st century.

Prospective members will go through a rigorous application process before being selected by the incubator's Director and staff committee. Incubator members will then pay a monthly fee in exchange for...

Editor's Picks #314

2013-05-07T13:14:00-04:00

Over at the LA Times, Christopher Hawthorne reported on LACMA Director Michael Govan’s plan’s for $650-million new building by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor...Eric Chavkin commented "New construction has always been fundraising tail that wags the museum dog. Big names to draw bigger money...Now that AMPAS is leveraging it's Oscar prestige to be a part of LACMA, a new name to entice donor dollars is Zumthor, a name that means absolutely nothing to most.

News
Michael Z Wise reviewed the newest edition of Albert Speer, Architecture by Léon Krier for the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Wise concluded his review "Though he is again bemoaning a contemporary inability to regard classicism in a detached manner, it is Léon Krier who is in a delirious thrall to a malevolent aesthetic".

Will Galloway was surprised "wow, i didn't need another reason to dislike krier, but this one certainly seems more than enough to set aside any other complaint about the guy and never revisit them. its amazing that someone could hate modernism so much that even hitler's vision for the world seems palatable to him. nasty". For his part Steven Ward
argued "I'd rather see the swastika redeemed for its original associations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika) than see any redemption of Speer's work. It's not that the style(s) from which he borrowed were bad so much as his intentional bombastic over-scaling of everything. These buildings were meant to communicat...

UC Davis selects SO – IL to design art museum

2013-05-01T18:30:00-04:00

UC Davis today announced that it has selected an emerging New York-based design firm, SO – IL, to design the campus’s planned art museum, envisioned as a regional center of experimentation, participation and learning. The firm will work with team members Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, a prominent architectural firm with offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Pennsylvania, and contractor Whiting-Turner, a national construction firm...

The new museum advances the way museums and architecture are approached in the 21st century.

Designed by SO - IL in partnership with Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, and built by Whiting-Turner, the design incorporates a 50,000 square foot steel structure that floats atop a series of interconnected interior and exterior spaces. The gallery space will be 29,000 square feet.

In describing the building, the architects state:

Davis is an ideal setting for a museum that will sow new ways of thinking about the experience of art. The Central Valley breathes a spirit of optimism. Whether one is influenced by the sweeping views over the flat plains beyond to the horizon, or the sense of empowerment one feels when being able to cultivate and grow freely—the spirit of this place is of invention and imagination. It is precisely this spirit we capture in our architectural proposal for the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.

As an overarching move, the design proposes a 50,000 s...

Archinect - News

SO – IL and OSD to overhaul Detroit marina for new waterfront district

SO – IL creates 3D knit textile passage for Bruges Triennial 2024

SO – IL presents designs for their new Williams College Museum of Art expansion

SO – IL becomes the latest architecture firm to achieve B Corp certification

SO – IL will design a new building for the vaunted Williams College Museum of Art

SO – IL and Hassell's Melbourne Arts Precinct master plan is moving forward after gaining approval

Frida Escobedo has replaced David Chipperfield on the Met's $500 million modern and contemporary wing expansion

Dream the Combine, Germane Barnes, Nina Cooke John, Design Earth, and SO – IL among winners of the 2022 USA Fellowship

SO – IL's newest residential complex offers Brooklynites a 'new way of living'

SO-IL unveils photos of social housing project in Mexico

SO – IL's Florian Idenburg pens an op-ed opposing the boarding-up of museums

Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Portugal reopens with new SO-IL-designed architectural intervention and exhibition

SO-IL's new museum for UC Davis: "a building to boost your faith in the future of American architecture"

SO-IL and Gensler to ​design creative​ cultural ​incubator for New Museum

Editor's Picks #314

UC Davis selects SO – IL to design art museum

SO-IL and Gensler to design creative cultural incubator for New Museum