Interview with Winka Dubbeldam

A practicing architect and founding principal of the New York firm Archi-Tectonics, Winka Dubbeldam is widely known for her award-winning work, recognized as much for its use of hybrid sustainable materials and smart building systems as for its elegance and innovative structures. Winka Dubbeldam is a seasoned academic and design leader, serving as Chair and Miller Professor of Architecture at PennDesign, where she has gathered an international network of innovative research and design professionals. Previously, Professor Dubbeldam oversaw the Post-Professional Degree program for 10 years (2003-2013), providing students with innovative design skills, cutting-edge theoretical and technological knowledge, and the analytic, interpretive, and writing skills necessary for a productive and innovative career in the field of architecture. She also taught advanced architectural design studios at Columbia University and Harvard University, among other such institutions. Born in the Netherlands, Dubbeldam has an MArch from the Institute of Higher Professional Architectural Education, Rotterdam (1990), and a MSAAD from Columbia University (1992).

Archi-Tectonics’ work ranges from residential to commercial, from real to virtual, and is realized in a variety of formats including urban designs, architectural designs, and installations. Recent projects include the V33 building, the Brewster Building, and the Chelsea Townhouse (all in New York City); the Ports1961 flagship retail stores in Paris, London and Shanghai; and the American Loft Building, Philadelphia. Archi-Tectonics designed a Pro-Bono Project in Monrovia Liberia, a completely self-sustainable school and orphanage for the Cooper Foundation. It is conceived as a “sustainable village,” with courtyards with specific functions such as outdoor classrooms, playgrounds, and gardens. The buildings are built from local materials such as perforated concrete block and bamboo woven walls. The structures have natural ventilation and solar energy, and roofs are designed to collect rainwater. Dubbeldam also headed a design-research team to re-invigorate Downtown Bogota, and recently won the Asian Games Sports Park Competition (2018). We speak to Winka in detail about these and other projects throughout her career, on what the role of the architect is today, and how her work has evolved since her early experiments with form, space and the digital.

As a practicing professional in the field today, how are you able to navigate the ever-changing landscape of the what it means to be an architect?

What is interesting I think is when people say ‘architecture’ they think of every building. A building is not necessarily architecture. That everyday strip-mall, for instance, might be a good building, but it’s not necessarily architecture. I think it’s really important to make that distinction. For me, the practicing architect today is working more with the manufacturers directly, rather than designing a building and then relying on a general contractor to price it. As a practice, in our office we always figure out the most complex part of a building first, working closely with multiple manufacturers on the building details, and getting cost-estimates as we go. We work like this until we feel we’ve reached a reasonable price for the project, and then we choose the GC and provide them with options of different vendors they can work with and their prices. Otherwise, if you try to do anything innovative in the US they just double the price for the whole building, and you lose your convincing argument to the client as the building gets cheapened. So, we tend to take that responsibility here in the office, and I see it really as a part of being an architect. I do it also because it’s intellectually stimulating, it’s really good for the office to speak with the manufacturers directly, we learn a lot from them and I feel this adds to the intelligence of the building itself. It’s not so much that it becomes closer to industrial design, it is industrial design at that point – so you can really advance the way buildings are made in this way. And, it goes without saying, as environmental concerns continue to increase, so too must we increase our responsible use of natural resources.

The rewriting and innovation of architectural design and its structures requires a revolutionary change in the thinking of how architecture is now conceived. From the notion that a building is a composite of standardized elements such as columns, floors, and walls, we have to re-think a building being composed of mass-customized generative components. These components are organic in nature and resemble the human body in its complexity and natural fit. By making the components more integral and intelligent, human occupation is accommodated rather than allowed, interactive rather than passive. From a construction standpoint, smart components require a level of prefabrication, but prefabrication as pure repetition of standard elements is an outdated mode of operation; mass-customized units are evolving as a series of varying elements, defined by an analysis of specific performance analysis, rather than just structural requirements. Standard repetition has been replaced by custom variation. The components’ intelligence refers more to car and plane design than to architectural design, is more system-based than a mechanical assembly-based. Prefabrication itself is changing; whereas before it would be described as the industrial manufacturing of the same repetitive element, now units are custom-manufactured in a series of varying elements, specific for its use and in its efficiency. This more organic, systematic way of thinking is common ground for scientists and industrial designers, but is relatively new for architects. This will not only change the way architecture is designed, manufactured, and assembled, but essentially allow for an innovative approach for how architecture could innovate and develop in the next millennia to come.

How do you define intelligent architecture?

We think or architecture as being intelligent in two ways. Firstly, we have worked a lot with the MIT Media Lab to incorporate technology into the architecture itself in various ways. With the ‘Q-Tower’ for instance, we took existing technologies and we designed a new interface that essentially made all these disparate things connected and allowed for feedback between the user or inhabitant and the space itself, and the system had some very simple beginnings of learning. This was nothing new as an overarching concept, but I think that was actually the smartness of combining it that was new. We used sensors for blinds reacting to sunlight, a virtual doorman, smart-delivery closets that were sized based on their contents, and your mobile phone would alert you when you got a delivery, the same with where your blinds were, and so forth. Everything was coming back to your phone, push a button to signal you’ve arrived home and bollards would go down, allowing residents to enter. The Nest thermostat starts to approximate this, but this was like a hyper-Nest. We had large containers for your storage in the basement that were packed tightly horizontally and you could pull them up to your apartment to access it and change-out its contents, your winter-wardrobe for instance, so it became a closet that you could leave in your space or you could tuck it away. That was a really fun project, and I actually got that project by talking to a client about my dream of building a ‘robotic tower’ and he was like ‘if you can build a robotic tower I’ll fund it’!

The other way we consider architecture to be intelligent is that it is analogous to the car which is not intelligent in itself but rather is a smart compilation of intelligent components. Essentially a smart building is made from smart components, and as an architect, we’re not going to develop a window for one tower, we will have to convince manufacturers to make smarter window systems in general; and it slowly happens. I was just at Zaha’s building here on the High-Line and there is an Austrian curtain-wall manufacture that has floor-to-ceiling windows with a tiny door-bell like button on the mullion – when you push the button the window goes straight-out, creating a 4” gap all around it. For me, that was the first time that I saw the window revisited, and It’s not like the whole facade has to change, it just contains smarter components. It’s just amazing to me that this doesn’t happen on a regular basis, honestly, it shouldn’t be that hard to have our sliders, the basic sliding window, just opening and closing electronically. We are here in an office surrounded by windows that none of us can move – we need two people to slide an aluminum window that is essentially new! So, it’s completely crazy. There is the film they use for airplanes and cars that is self-cleaning and rejects water, not on buildings. When I propose it for a project, it’s really not that expensive but it’s the first thing that gets value-engineered out. But the owners are willing to pay huge sums for these little guys to hang on wood planks and wash the windows for basically the whole year, by the time they finish it’s time to start on the other side again! So it’s interesting to me that people have such a short-term vision for something that is, in essence, a long-term investment.

Could you tell me more about the ‘Q-Tower’ project?

The Q Tower is a 24-unit tower located in Philadelphia’s dynamic Northern Liberties neighborhood, with an elevated ground floor world-class restaurant. The building has been developed as a ‘smart’ tower, with integrated systems reactive to its inhabitants. Our collaboration with Ted Selker of the Context Aware Computing Lab at MIT Media Lab is aimed at integrating interactive living environments, developing the tower as a ‘learning’ structure. The MIT Media Lab is recognized for its work in creating environments that use sensors and artificial intelligence to create so-called virtual sensors, adaptive models of users to create keyboard-less computer scenarios. Sensor technologies will facilitate the interaction of the users with the tower as a unit: RFID controlled ‘contactless’ fast-pass access, robotic storage, smart controls, with sensors for lighting, sound, and air-conditioning all increase ease of use and energy-efficiency. The collaboration has produced a wide range of innovations in the building systems: an in-car Smart Pass allows automatic parking access, will register the delivery ‘Smart Closets,’ and give feedback to a virtual doorman. All this will make the tower a responsive structure, easy to inhabit. Each living unit has been designed to be ‘special’ to its inhabitant. Algorithmic rule sets allocate room type and variation based on programmatic relationships, transparency percentage, and change in transition angles. All possible room transitions—experienced here as potential windows—are made available as an algorithmic set. Each potential transition is considered before the optimal window subset

is chosen and the next decision tree is started. All trees are looping and linked, and are therefore affected by both past and future decisions. The result is an envelope that is able to respond fluidly to both the dynamic programmatic conditions within the building and to itself, re-thinking the relationship of window and façade to allow them to be integral to one another. The FTF—or file-to-factor—method was developed so that single continuous metal sheets can be shaped by computer-driven equipment according to algorithmically generated geometries, which are generated in a parametric software. This approach permits the structures to be modeled and easily fabricated, translating into reasonable costs. Also, the building is off the grid, using geothermal energy, smart lighting, and cooling controls on sensors. The use of local, recycled materials—glass-asphalt, recycled aluminum—and intelligent appliances further reduces the use of energy and resources.

Q-Tower. Proposal for a 15 story residential tower in Northern Liberties, PA. Archi-Tectonics with MIT MediaLab. 2009.

 

I believe there is a new interest in the body, in the solid, in massive forms. No longer minimal, light and thin, but full bodied, soft, glowing and sometimes transformative, these solids give us comfort, ground us, and wrap us in a soft embrace. They are not anonymous, cold and sleek, but they have character, identity, and make us smile. They are not overly serious, but yet often are a feat of great engineering, new material ecologies, and groundbreaking production methods. In short they stand for innovation. We did a book with Princeton Press called ‘A-T Index’, and what was great about working with a really good editor who looked at the work he said ‘it’s almost like you work according to larger fields of research’, and I was quite stunned because that actually was the case but I had never verbalized it like that. Definitely in the 90’s we were very much geared towards the city, this idea of the facade being the 2nd-and-a-half dimension … that you can inhabit a facade, and the facade is no longer for stability and security but more like a raincoat where massive innovation can actually happen in the facade itself. You can either de-materialize it or over-materialize it. And we starting thinking about digital design as an option to not have ornament applied onto the surface but rather the surface itself can be made ornamented through its integration with technology, with the use of 3D printing or CNC-milling, for example you integrate everything you need in the surface, so the space is actually empty of objects and is solely created by this modulated surface. Then from there we went into what we call the ‘Armature’, where 3D bodies were activating the space, it was a more intense version of this 2nd-and-a-half dimension – it was now the 2nd-and-a-half dimension as a surface creating a larger body within a space, and then the space reacting to that, so kind of a body-within-a-body you could say. That’s very much the case in the GT Residence. We have a design in the Queens Museum right now, where we proposed a design for a SoHo hotel on 6th Avenue in Manhattan where the building consists of a wood body in a glass body, where the wood body is smaller and pulls back several times from the larger glass volume so that interesting inside/outside conditions occur. So the idea that there is a tension between these two elements, and it becomes self-referential in the process.

Gypsy Trail Residence. Floor Plan and Roof Plan of 3,000 s.f. private residence. Kent, NY.
Archi-Tectonics. Completed 2003.

That’s something that has always fascinated me about architects, their ability to be highly rigorous and precise when necessary, while simultaneously possessing the ability to explore an idea or a set of ideas in a more exploratory and abstract, even artistic, sense.

I actually studied sculpture and architecture! When I started studying architecture I couldn’t think ‘flat’ at all, and that’s probably a big reason why I’ve always been in the computer, so I can ‘see’ it! The computer allows you to be much more ‘in’ the design, rather than draw it from the outside, and that’s a huge change. I was also lucky in that I worked for an office in Holland, early on in my career, that was bringing computers into the process so while I was in school I was working with these guys that had that technology in the office and they taught me, so that helped. The technology these guys were using was really advanced as well. The fact that we were working with Rem Koolhaas to execute projects like the ‘Netherlands Dance Theater’ at the Hague and other first projects of his when he was extremely eager but very unpractical, this really prompted the need for such advanced technology in the office. So almost the whole time I have worked I’ve been working on the computer. I usually read early on in the design process … I like to think about what to do next by reading and thinking … I don’t like to look too much at others’ work as I guess because I’m afraid I’ll feel behind! No, but even with the lecture series I tend to combine people who are deeply theoretical with people who are working in practice, so it has definitely been an agenda of mine to combine research and design, or theory and design,without necessarily changing into a philosophy department. When I studied in Holland there was no academic background and I was intellectually completely bored, and I see that with my students they want more, deeper research, more rigorous things – they aren’t interested in superficiality.

HardWare to SoftForm. Exhibition. Archi-Tectonics. 2002.

You were a part of two important exhibitions early on in your career: the ‘Un-Private House’ at the MoMA, where your ‘Millbrook Residence’ sat alongside the likes of Elizabeth Diller’s ‘Slow House’ and Rem Koolhaas’ ‘Maison à Bordeaux’, and your solo ‘HardWare to SoftForm’ exhibition which was quite experimental in its approach and content at the time. Could you speak on the relationship between your early digital and spatial explorations, and your later more commercial work as a practicing architect?

With most of these, they were all part of my idea that architects shouldn’t simply ‘exhibit’, but should discuss larger issues in galleries or museums. With ‘HardWare to SoftForm’ we were studying the tension between dynamic environments and dynamic shapes, and how this really created another kind of experience for people. At the same time we also had the project for the Max Protetch Gallery where we did a computer game to look at what could happen to downtown after 9/11. When we were invited to participate and make a proposal for downtown for the ‘A New World Trade Center’ exhibit, it just seemed like the worst moment to make a cute little tower design. I mean it was a nightmare … watching all of those people walking up covered in dust was like a horror movie. We happened to be at our construction site of our building on Greenwich Street the day the World Trade Center was hit, and we saw the whole thing happening right in front of us. So it felt vain to start making some sort of design … and for the longest time I didn’t want to really do it, and I kept saying ‘I am thinking about it!’ to Max. Finally, he called me, and I agreed to participate, and I explained that I wanted to do a computer game where we’re going to give people different options that result in different proposals on the site, where you really understand that different decisions have different consequences – and he loved the idea and gave us full trust even though we worked on it right up until the day of the opening, so the curators had no idea what we were doing! That same exhibit went on to the Venice Biennale at the American Pavilion, and actually the Library of Congress bought it – so somewhere in the Library of Congress is our game! But it was good, and it was fun and even therapeutic to deal with the tragedy in a different way.

But you’re totally right, it was a period that was really about discovering and thinking and discussing; all of those projects really fed my book with Princeton Press which began to talk about our work as being a consequence of larger fields of research. It was an amazing period for me. It’s also something you do when you’re very young; you have no office that you have to ‘feed’. I was teaching at Columbia at that point, so we pulled students in and it was a very collaborative and experimental time. For me, the exhibits are there to create discussions about issues rather than just to ‘show’. The installation for Bogotá was in a way designed also like that, because we presented the project as distinct scenarios, rather than a traditional master plan, a loop where proposals were shown alongside quotes from the people on the website lined the walls; so the whole exhibit was framed by the feedback from the public.

What was the prompt in Bogotá?

We were asked to do a bottom-up design for downtown Bogotá, which is fifteen or so different areas together that compile the larger region that is considered ‘downtown’. It is surrounded by a ring-road of sorts and the road to the airport is to the north of it. The aim was to come up with solutions that would be implemented over many years, not your typical building project but more of an overall strategic plan. Rodrigo Nino, who asked us to be a part of the project, actually bought airtime on a local radio station that Colombians plan on their way to work, and between 6:00 and 8:00 a.m. those guys would talk to people about what they thought of their city, what they thought of downtown,what kind of proposals they wanted to see implemented, and would direct them to a website to tease out suggestions and reactions from people; in the meantime I had suggested a team to work on this project which included PSFK, an English marketing trend research company that is very involved with behavioral aspects of people while being very projective of the future, so it’s not quite marketing in the traditional American sense. Together with them we created something like 3,000 questions that we posted on the website, we also made available background information that people could access if they were interested in it; at the same time while they were gathering this information which was super-interesting, not because we had time to read each individual response, but because we could see trends in the public’s thinking as a whole. So while we were working on a plan for downtown we were doing so in a way that we academically consider ‘bottom-up’, which for us meant that we were looking at what was already in place, and using what we found to either accelerate or solve the intrinsic problems found in that particular area. The goal here being to make the most condensed, informed and therefore ‘smartest’ proposition, one that would only be accepted by us as a team if we found that there would lets say three to five feedback loops as a result. For example we looked at downtown and what we found very quickly is that while Bogotá is seriously overpopulated in the downtown area there are only 250,000 people living there, but there are 33 schools and universities, so out of the 1.7 million daily commuters, a million were students and faculty. We also found that due to the lessened population in downtown, there are a high number of empty buildings. So the first thing we proposed is to turn many of these unused buildings into micro-housing; the immediate benefit being that the million or so school-related commuters can be turned very quickly into a local population which can now walk to their destinations. This would then prompt the development of local restaurants and cafes, bars, libraries and so on to support the population’s needs; also social presence adds a level of safety as we all know so we ultimately get a more lively, safer downtown. So with this kind of thinking we were able to assess the feedback provided by the surveys and predict quite easily whether there would be direct benefits or not before we developed the idea and proposed it as a potential solution. We proposed something like five scenarios like this which included rethinking the local traffic patterns, restoring one of the pre-existing rivers to reinvigorate areas that were once wetlands for the purposes of recreation and urban agriculture and so on.

Being able to engage with the public in such a way and on such a large scale, and then using that data to inform the design itself is I’m sure a very challenging. Did this process change the way you think about the city, about architecture and urban design?

With the surveys we definitely got a sense of the trends, but really we had to study enormous amounts of data to understand the dynamics of the city. People won’t give you that, directly, they tend to give very emotional or even sentimental responses. It was great to do research, have an assumption of what you thought was really needed, and then check it. When my client launched the website we had something like 4,500 followers, after a couple of weeks we had around 80,000 followers – it was amazing to see how quickly the interest in the project grew. Master plans tend to fail; what seems to work much better are strategic moves like these, a kind of architectural acupuncture, specific interventions that are much more holistic and support or even cause growth. Our end product was a book that compiled and explained these proposals, which we presented in an exhibition and symposium. The beautiful thing is that the client is starting to implement some of these moves such as providing spaces for artists while rehabilitating a certain area that was in desperate need of healing. We got to work with a great group of people and we were very impressed with the level of collaboration that not only we experienced with this project, but through our traveling there many times and experiencing multiple aspects of Colombia we found that design there seems to be highly collaborative in nature.

As Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, could you expand on the main interests of your teaching and agendas regarding the Department as a whole?

Being a Chair of a Department I’ve had many great architects as guests, but also lecturers like Timothy Morton and Graham Harman visit us a few times already; and I must say our faculty is majorly influenced by these two, so we had great discussions and really intense dialogue during these lectures. I organize these highly theoretical lecturers and I’m always worried that no one will show up, but those are actually the most attended of all, and the students are super-curious and really ask amazing questions and I’m always impressed by this. Personally, I think I’ve always felt that buildings are ‘stand-alones’ in a way, not that they have to be completely antagonizing or hyper-articulated as such, but the fact that a building can be self-referential to its own interior space is, for me, more interesting. So I tend to not so much react to the outside but rather I’m drawn more so to the tension that exists between interior bodies that are reacting to each other.

When I started at Penn I was there to build the Post-Professional Degree program. The program wasn’t accredited, so I was basically given free reign to devise how I thought it should be. I worked on building a network of cities and developers and experts, whoever I could find and started working with them on design problems with the students. We did a station for hi-speed trains in Rome, Tel-Aviv invited us to look at the housing of the future for their centennial year, in Puerto Rico we were asked to work with the University to look at a local neighborhood. The program grew really fast, and then when I became Chair I had to learn about everything that goes along with accreditation, administration, et cetera, and I continue to look to my fellow faculty to work with me on this! As Chair of the Department now my goal was to try to remake PennDesign inside-out. We started with a conference called ‘the New Normal’, and it was based on the idea that after 20 years of digital design how can we still call this ‘new’? So we declared a new platform, and we called it ‘the Normal’, and that was where we had landed after 20 years of digital design. And the question of the conference was ‘now, if this is normal, where do we go from here? What have we accomplished? How has practice changed, and where do we go from here?’. So that was a nice way to establish where I wanted to go. It started with an opening lecture by Neil Denari and it closed with Ben van Berkel, and we had great discussions throughout the conference. The as a part of this inside-out restructuring, I realized where I had thought oh the first semester I’m just going to reorient myself and see how it goes, I also realized I knew too much about the place because I had been there … but I couldn’t sit back so I just said OK I’m going to do five things, and limit myself to just these initial changes I wanted to make. Firstly I went to the students and asked for their feedback about what they wanted to see change in the program, then I started a lecture series, and we started an annual book of the Department of Architecture, ‘Pressing Matters’. That was interesting because I realized that what you decide to put in your annual publication is really a statement of who you are – and if you put out a catalog with ‘parametric’ work or ‘digital’ work, and in the grayed out zone in the back somewhere are some courses or some research or whatever, then that’s who you are. I saw the difference between the books that I published with my post-grad students that were about people, results, areas where we went, the research we did, the feedback we got, the way we made the projects, the whole process. So I decided to change the Pressing Matters publication in such a way that it highlights those areas more so, and now we’ve become known for research, which makes sense because ultimately we’re an ivy-league school and Penn is known as a research-intensive University as a whole, which means the infrastructure for conducting intensive research and the potential for cross-disciplinary collaboration is already there! This is a nice change for us as a school and for the profession as a whole, as I believe architects are undervalued in general due to their common perception as mere form-makers. Contrary to that, we are researchers, we are experts, we are probably one of the few groups people that can put large teams together and work on complex problems holistically without too much of an ego, and we’re very good at assessing and abstracting very large complex problems, into quite simple methods of working.

497 Greenwich Building. Exploded perspective drawing and exterior view of 80,000 s.f. building with residential lofts & retail: a new 11-story glass structure folding over a renovated six-story brick warehouse, a ‘para-building’. West Soho, NYC. Archi-Tectonics. Completed 2004.

How do you select a project to pursue?

I don’t think I select people as much as they come to me; usually when a client comes to us they already know the work and they see something that they appreciate in it, which gives us the opportunity to really work with the client in a meaningful way. We typically work on five or six projects at the same time – which you have to do if you want longevity in your office. What surprised me is that I find that New York to be weirdly conservative. It has a reputation for being so modern (and it is in many ways) but architecture-wise and design-wise it is actually quite conservative. Even designers who have the most advanced ideas very often do extremely conservative work. I feel like I’ve studied too long and I value my work too much to do that, so I don’t. If I build a little less as a result, then I’m totally fine with that. I think that my drive is to just keep doing what I believe in, and if people like it they will come and ask me to do something for them. It’s a slower approach, but it works. I don’t feel the need to produce just for the sake of doing so. There are a lot of people out there that feel differently, and I’m not judging them at all, but it’s not just for me. That’s why I’ve always been in some ways tied to academia – so I can be a ‘free-agent’ so to speak.

How do you respond when someone asks you ‘what do you do?’

If the public was aware of the distinction between architecture and building, that we spoke of before, it would be enough to simply say ‘I’m an architect’, but I usually answer that we are modern and innovative, and that we aim for each building to have a large ‘innovative’ part, and that we see that part as not only being technologically innovative but as the aesthetic and conceptual driver for the building as a whole. For us, this idea of ‘innovation’ is almost like when you toss a rock in the water, the ripples causes by the rock changes the water around it, but not in the sense that it becomes the rock. So if we innovate a part of the building, the effect of that innovation will ripple through the building in a way, so that building will adjust to these segments or parts but in a very calm way, oscillating perhaps between areas of intensification and calmer and slower parts that, although they are identified with the whole, aren’t necessarily as intense. I think this kind of kind of gradient makes for really good living environments as well as allowing certain parts to be hyper-articulated and highly innovative. One thing you learn very quickly when you come out of school and you start building is that it’s 10% design and 90% execution. You have to prioritize how you are going to make your buildings stand-out in the way you want them, and you have to constantly make choices that either supports or opposes this. What I’ve realized is that it’s very important that a building has identity, and character. I realized that when we built 497 Greenwich Street; what we tried to do was really to figure out how to integrate an existing warehouse with a glass and steel structure and also how to decode the building code in a way that allowed for a continuous system with the glass exterior. When people starting buying lofts though, I realized they talked about that building different from other ones, they almost talked about the building like a pet, it was their building, they really took ownership of it! They were not just having an apartment somewhere, they lived in that building. So it’s important that a building have an ‘identity’; if so, it immediately speaks to the inhabitants and they begin to identify with it.

Inscape. Main meditation room. Manhattan, NY. Archi-Tectonics. 2016. Photo credit: Frederick Charles / Inscape.

What’s next for Winka Dubbeldam?

I’m feel like I’m in the middle … I’m looking forward to the other half! I’m kind of configuring that right now, the office just got a new partner, we’re starting a new website, and I think our upcoming book with Actar brings out very well what we’re specifically focused on and what we like to do. And maybe it is a bringing together a bit more of what you noticed about the earlier installations and about practice, but as a practice, lets say.

Grand Canal Asian Games Park. Winning proposal to the Asian Games Sports Park Competition. Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China. Archi-Tectonics. 2018.

For more information on Archi-Tectonics work visit www.archi-tectonics.com

For more information on the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, click here

© 2018.Interview for Arch2o.com by Zack Saunders of ARCH[or]studio.

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