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if...then:
Architectural Speculations, The Architectural
League of New York.
The sixth in an annual series of
publications that features the winners of the Architectural
League of New York's Young Architects competition has
the rather vague-sounding theme "if...then". Referring to
the binary programming of computers (if a then b), this
does not translate into the six chosen architects being
slaves to the computer, cranking out blobs and the like.
Instead, each architect is grounded in the computer's importance
to architectural practice - especially in design and production
- with a variety of foci and results.
Fernando Romero (LCM)
has built the most of the six winners, perhaps owing this
trait to the inexpensive construction in Mexico City, his
creative small-scale house designs having lead to a high-rise
commission now under construction. Tom Wiscombe's EMERGENT
won the Young
Architects Program at PS 1 a couple years ago; his projects
presented here are the most overtly computerized of the
bunch. Studio Luz's focus appears to be small interiors,
such as restaurants and bars, and other types where surface
and skin are of the utmost importance. Another competition
winner is Mitnick
Roddier Hicks, whose design of the Spertus Institute
for 2002's Burnham Prize is a tough act to follow. The Borden
Partnership cranks out house designs like they're going
out of style, many of them with strong concepts for alternative
ways of living. And finally Miloby
Ideasystem embraces branding as an integral component
of architecture, something that sets them apart.
Beyond the computer analogy of "if...then",
the projects presented broadly illustrate the importance
of that sort of thinking (if I design this/that way, then
what will happen?) towards what they design, what the organizers
term architectural fictions. While if...then may have been
more predictable in the time of Modernism, now it is a flexible
idea that requires new ways of approaching design, something
these architects share in their own unique ways.
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