League Prize exhibition

“Objective” an exhibition featuring the winners of the 2018 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers

June 21, 2018—August 4, 2018, Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries
Organized by the Architectural League of New York at the Parsons School of Design / The New School, 66 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

While our approach and process are logic-based and rational, we find our objectives in subjectivity, in stories told, places visited and spaces imagined. We find our motivations in conversation between one another and with others, and we measure the success of our projects by the memories they create.

Social Infrastructures, Expanded Preservation and Domestic Narratives are three themes through which we understand our work. Each of these was exhibited on one face of a postcard rack.

Taking cues from our built projects and our broader design agenda, the rack and cards were a colorful, familiar, un-precious and accessible framework that invited interaction. As analog prompts in a digital world, we hoped the postcards might spark small moments of exchange and conversation when they left the gallery.

Expanded Preservation

Expanded Preservation questions traditional methods of preservation and proposes modes of representation and documentation which aim to augment the factual through individual lived experience. These projects take the form of narrative, visual recording or installations and offer an alternative to the established modes of object-centric preservation. 

'Growing up Modern' is an ongoing research and documentation project based on a series of interviews with individuals who were, as children, the first inhabitants of radical buildings from the early twentieth century. Through oral history and photographic documentation based on the recollections, the project records the experiences lived in revolutionary Modernist houses and housing. 

Social Infrastructures

Social Infrastructures aim to engage individuals in public space through playful shared experiences. As analog prompts in a digital age, these structures bring people together and offer moments of connection. In a time of pronounced disunities these simple sparks of interaction have the potential to, however briefly, bring people of different backgrounds together.

Full Circle, Buffalo, New York, 2016
Dialogue, Cleveland, Ohio, 2017
Vertical Line Garden, Grand-Métis, Québec, 2017
Hookup, Buffalo, New York, 2018
Ziggy, Toronto, Ontario, 2018

Domestic Narratives

Domestic Narratives are based in a motivation to tell stories through everyday spaces by giving expression to the desires of others and shape to our own projections. Designing spaces from the perspective of a child or imagining scenarios for changing use, we embed idiosyncratic moments into domestic architecture. 

Sky House, Stoney Lake, Ontario, 2017

Footsteps echoing on a wooden ramp announcing arrival, a bed as wide as the room to hold all her friends and curling up on the swingbench beneath the house are just some aspects of Sky House we designed specifically with our clients’ young daughter in mind. 

Photos: Doublespace Photography