For the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, New York City-based firm SO-IL designed a site-specific installation, Passage, which reflects upon and destabilizes the spatial qualities of the ramp. The studio’s founders speak with New Museum Deputy Director Karen Wong about their design process, current projects, and “inventing magic” through architecture.

Karen Wong: I would like to explore the attitudes and themes of your studio practice through three current projects. Florian, let’s start with you and the Shrem Museum of Art in Davis, California. This was not a typical competition — you knew going into the process that this would be a design-and-build contract. You are on-site now. What have been the pros and cons of the D&B process?

Florian Idenburg: In this case, design/build meant that we had to generate a proposal as part of a team that included a contractor and associate architect. We also had to guarantee the total construction cost of the project — no room for overruns. Our fees were tied into the total number.

One thing we were quite excited about was that we could significantly innovate the infill of the canopy. Originally, these were just flat sheets of perforated metal, since this was not something we could fully resolve in the short time of the competition. Through precise modeling and geometry optimization, we were able to change this infill to triangular perforated beams, some spanning up to 35 feet, making the experience under the canopy substantially more exciting and memorable, in the way the light trickles through. We have a full-scale mock-up on-site, and it’s exciting to see this coming together.

KW: Context and density have often framed your previous projects. In this case you were given a large plot on a campus setting. Did you have more freedom here?

FI: For this project, the site is very important on a number of levels. Let me try to explain. Davis is located in the northern region of California’s Central Valley. As you know this part of California produces one third of the US agricultural output, and currently this is the area most affected by the West Coast drought. It is an incredibly flat, geometrically organized landscape of production, with the Sacramento River winding through it. With the design, we wanted to heighten an awareness of this place, and the environmental conditions.

At the same time, the site is located on the edge of campus, not in the main area where the students hang out — so really at the periphery — while at the same time abutting the interstate between Sacramento and San Francisco. This meant the site was a focal point from the outside of campus, but within the campus it really needed to be an attractor, to draw people towards the building.

Lastly, the program was much smaller than the site. So our idea of the large canopy covering the entire site does a few things at once. It filters light and heat, making it an attractive place for the students to be, while making people aware of the climate. It also creates volume that appears larger than the museum itself, but with a lower threshold for entry.

KW: Since I am not an architect and I am not beholden to your vocabulary, I am going to make a brash statement. That chain link facade covering your Kukje Gallery in Seoul is damn sexy. I’m feeling some of that same energy in the canopy that envelopes the various buildings of the Shrem Museum of Art. Why the oculus? Elucidate the design process, please!

FI: In both these projects we use the outer edge as a soft border, a veil — which is maybe why you feel some sort of seduction. We do use material, daylight, and the edge to give buildings an aura, a tactile layer. We carefully consider the placement of material—and void—in order to create a filter, or frame, that makes one wonder. The oculus at the Shrem Museum allows for a view in, possibly creating intrigue. Once you’re underneath, it makes you realize the difference in light, temperature, and feeling between the various canopied areas.

In many of our projects we work very closely with fabricators, not because of some sort of obsession with ‘making,’ but because we know that every detail affects the total experience greatly.

SO-IL is a New York City design office that brings together extensive experience from the fields of architecture, academia, and the arts. Lead by partners Florian Idenburg, Jing Liu and Ilias Papageorgiou, it has worked on an array of projects including the Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California in Davis, Frieze Art Fair in NYC, and the Kukje Gallery in Seoul.

Karen Wong is deputy director of the New Museum in New York City, and cofounder of the Ideas City conference and NEW INC, an experimental arts incubator. She is also a board member of +POOL, Rhizome, and Apex, a mentoring and education program for underserved Asian youth.

This is an excerpt of a longer conversation, condensed and edited for clarity by Consortia. The full text of this conversation and many others will be featured inThe State of the Art of Architecture, the catalogue of the first Chicago Architecture Biennial. The book will be published by Lars Müller Publishers in November 2015.

For more information, visithttp://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/exhibition/publications.

_________________________ was originally published in Chicago Architecture Biennial on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In a conversation between Jeanne Gang, Principal of Chicago-based firm Studio Gang, and Zoë Ryan, Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago, Gang discusses her practice; what it means for architects to be engaged in larger social issues; and her timely, radical project reimagining the police station for the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Zoë Ryan: Can you talk about your Biennial project?

Jeanne Gang: We’re studying the relationship between communities and policing, through the lens of the space of the police station. Prompted by current incidents of police violence against people of color, as well as the May 2015 publication of a report by President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, we wanted to know if design could play a part in the effort to re-build trust. We took the recommendations or “pillars” in the report and tried to see if they could be made architectural. This has necessarily entailed talking with community members and organizers of all ages, local activists, public officials, members of law enforcement, and academics, listening to their stories and trying to understand everyone’s viewpoint, needs, and desires. Of course some issues are beyond architecture, like achieving gun control laws, but we began translating the information that had spatial implications into ideas about design. We were drawn to thinking about the police station because it is its own physical entity; as a space, it has the potential to set the stage for the “pillars” to succeed, to potentially rebuild and strengthen links within communities.

ZR: This is surprising, because I would have thought that police stations are typically the places that we veer away from unless we need urgent help.

JG: I think for many people police stations are intimidating spaces with negative connotations, but why is that? Instead, what if police stations could be safe havens and places of engagement? Police stations need certain areas that are very highly secured, but there is great potential to expand the public side of this building type. Police stations could be the glue in a neighborhood, where community members could securely do everyday things like vote, pay bills, sign up their kids for summer camp, or find employment opportunities. These types of activities could take the stigma out of entering the station and make it more welcoming. There might be many combinations of program within the police station that could redefine how they are used and perceived. We are also looking at the police station historically to understand why it is what it is today — as a building type but also as a social construct.

Maybe conversations about these difficult issues, made so visible in the news throughout the past year, could be approached more objectively through the lens of urban design and architecture. The Task Force’s report has put forth many astute recommendations to address this issue — but so far none of them have to do with physical space.

ZR: Is this really the impetus for the project? It’s a much more national issue.

JG: It’s more the result of being a citizen — awareness of what’s going on and asking what could be done. The Task Force report is extensive. It’s very powerful and promising. We were curious how it would inform space, program, and community.

ZR: How does it?

JG: It’s more focused on policy and procedural changes than the effect of physical space. But that’s what we’re hoping to begin to address. To give just one example, our interviews revealed there is a desire for more regular, informal, and positive interactions between police officers and community members, not just confrontations in the line of duty — and that these interactions work to build trust. Officers have been asked to volunteer as coaches for local youth teams in the communities where they work, but oftentimes these opportunities are not very easily accessible. We’re exploring how to incorporate more community amenities and program at the police station so that there is more opportunity for casual interaction on site. Many of the ideas we’re exploring are actually relatively inexpensive and easy to implement. We’re excited to share our findings and highlight the interesting work that’s being done in this area and to spark further conversation. For me, that is what’s so exciting about the Biennial — how it offers a forum to ask these questions and to continue conversations. It has the potential to push ideas and research forward, to highlight issues that encompass architecture but ultimately bring it to the service of community.

ZOË RYAN is the John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. She was previously a curator at the Van Alen Institute in New York, and directed the second Istanbul Design Biennial in 2014 titled “The Future is Not What is Used to Be.”

JEANNE GANG is an architect and principal of Studio Gang, which she established in 1997 and now has offices in Chicago and New York. Her built projects include the 819 ft. (250 m) Aqua Tower in Chicago, completed in 2009.

This is an excerpt of a longer conversation, condensed and edited for clarity by Consortia. The full text of this conversation and many others will be featured inThe State of the Art of Architecture, the catalogue of the first Chicago Architecture Biennial. The book will be published by Lars Müller Publishers in November 2015.

For more information, visithttp://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/exhibition/publications.

_________________________ was originally published in Chicago Architecture Biennial on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Chilean art and architecture studio of Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen collaborated with students from the IIT College of Architecture to design one of the Lakefront Kiosks commissioned by the Chicago Architecture Biennial for the Chicago Parks District. Pezo and von Ellrichshausen sat down with architect and critic Fabrizio Gallanti to discuss their approach to design and the role of local context in architecture.

Fabrizio Gallanti: Your works manifest a strong continuity in the architectural language they employ. The different projects pertain to a “family”: in your design process, how do you balance between stylistic recurrence and the different programs of each?

Sofia von Ellrichshausen: We certainly follow the idea of “always doing the same thing but never in the same way,” a beautiful piece of advice given by an Argentinian poet to those who make art. We have always worked in series, repeating common attributes in some cases, as variations of the same thoughts over and over again. But this method was not defined as the pretext for doing what we have done.

It was quite the opposite; we developed a formal system that could be determined by particular circumstances, a kind of synthetic informality. With time we have realized that we can use almost the same logic for other cases. Somehow, in an unexpected way, we have discovered that our own arguments were not exhausted in a single case, so our spatial exploration could go beyond the program, the context, or the given technical resources. We never impose a form on a form of life.

Mauricio Pezo: That is why we prefer to replace the notion of form by the notion of a format. A format is a general outline that is basically determined by a certain size and a certain direction. We believe we can repeat the same format for a diverse range of situations. There is always a fitting process, an appropriate size, an extension that works better for a specific moment. Nevertheless, we believe there is no exact correlation between form and function — which is no more than a modernist myth.

FG: International critics assume that because you are from Chile, there should be some “Chilean” quality in your design. I always find that very hard to detect, in your work but also, in general, within the significant variety of architectural production in Chile. How do you feel about that simplification, and what is the way in which you react to the local context?

SE: We don’t think in those terms. We don’t believe in labeled architecture. Any building that occupies the Chilean territory can be named Chilean architecture. We think there is no value in such a category, neither in the so-called Latin American architecture, nor in international architecture. Labels are no more than institutional reductions. We all know that by definition buildings are produced and constructed in an actual place, therefore they are affected by a unique natural or cultural context. But that doesn’t mean they should be a representation of that particular location, of a local identity.

MP: We are more interested in a general notion of identity, in the capacity of a building to be characteristic, singular, and unique. We understand buildings as individual objects filled with qualities, with spatial and material character; objects that are not only determined by an inner atmosphere but also by a presence, by a personality, a resemblance of themselves.

It is inevitable, or rather reasonable, to take advantage of local resources when building that object. But local materials or techniques, as well as the existing topography or landscape, in our view, are not the real argument of an architectonic artifact, but some of the many means to achieve something else: the understanding of a structural relationship. Buildings are always rooted in a specific place, in a locality, even if they are temporarily installed. But this does not mean that there is a hierarchical relationship between that object and its background.

We prefer to think about it as a reciprocal relationship, as a constant oscillation between autonomy, detachment, adjustment, or response. And this is a continuous process that occurs not only during the production of the architectural project, but also throughout the actual life of the building, in its interaction with a particular community, the traditions, the weather and so on. Most of these factors, fortunately, are beyond the architect’s control.

FG: Your practice has acquired an international dimension, translated into commissions, professorship, and participation in multiple initiatives. Which lessons have you incorporated in your thinking throughout that exposure?

SE: We have expanded our field of action only to confirm that our method of work, somehow guided by basic means and a logical intuition, is pertinent and even necessary in other cultural contexts. Our experience in prestigious and influential schools or museums is that there is a need for a more profound understanding of the art of architecture. There is an enormous amount of production and visualization of buildings, but very little reflection on how the specific elements of a building (e.g. a column or a window) have the capacity to determine the meaning of a place, without any other rhetoric.

MP: It is indeed interesting that one has to step away to confirm one’s own position. Perhaps that geographical distance works in two directions; it allows us to select what we want to see from the rest of the world and to be extremely careful with those new pieces we place in that relatively unknown world. In this act of placement, in opposition to the common places of many global practices, to claim local traditions or materials as features to “integrate” the building into the local culture seems too forced, or no more than a political or promotional slogan.

We neither want to go to a place and read it superficially, nor to impose any peripheral entitlement, any moralistic or self-patronizing validation. It is too reductive for us, too flattening. We are more interested in finding a common ground, a sensitive balance between those facts that we can transfer back and forth from our own experience, without hierarchies or prejudices, in a translation that allows itself to distort both realities. In the end, we are only working in those projects that make sense for us, where we can share and expand our own sensibility.

Pezo von Ellrichshausen is an art and architecture studio established in Concepción, southern Chile, in 2002, by Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen. Their work has won several awards, and has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennial, the Royal Academy of Arts, and MoMA. Pezo and Von Ellrichshausen teach at the Pontífica Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago and IIT College of Architecture in Chicago.

Fabrizio Gallanti is a founding member of the collective gruppo A12 (1993–2004) and the architectural research studio Fig-Projects (2003-present). He was previously the architecture editor and web editor of Abitare magazine, and Associate Director of Programs at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, Canada.

This is an excerpt of a longer conversation, condensed and edited for clarity by Consortia. The full text of this conversation and many others will be featured inThe State of the Art of Architecture, the catalogue of the first Chicago Architecture Biennial. The book will be published by Lars Müller Publishers in November 2015.

For more information, visit http://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/exhibition/publications.

_________________________ was originally published in Chicago Architecture Biennial on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Los Angeles- and Oslo-based architect is collaborating with the South Shore Drill Team on We Know How To Order, a performance for the Chicago Architecture Biennial that responds to the geometry of Mies van der Rohe’s Federal Plaza and the architecture of authority.

We Know How to Order will be performed on October 1, 2, and 3, 2015 in Federal Plaza. More information is available here.

Bryony Roberts has made site-specific installations and live interventions an important part of her ongoing practice, in each case inverting and activating the formal arrangements of existing architectural spaces as a way of engaging with them in a new light. In 2013, Roberts’ project Inverting Neutra filled the void spaces of Richard Neutra’s VDL Studio in Los Angeles with dense groups of hanging cords that rearranged the house’s system of interlocking interior and exterior volumes.

Roberts sat down with architectural historian and critic Sylvia Lavin, who directs the M.A. and Ph.D. programs in architecture at UCLA.

Bryony Roberts: I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on our project for the Biennial, and in general on the intersection between performance, preservation, and architecture. I’m collaborating with the South Shore Drill Team to do a site-specific performance at Mies’s Federal Plaza, called We Know How To Order.

It’s a live performance that will take place during the opening weekend in which forty young people from the South Side perform high-energy drill routines responding to the architecture. The piece is about different systems of order and what happens when they compound each other. The space of the Federal Plaza is highly ordered by the architecture and the systems of security — there is a Miesian grid that dictates everything from the pavers on the plaza to the building facades, and was later used to place lines of security bollards.

Its location within the downtown business district also reinforces its isolation from other urban activity. On the flip side, the South Shore Drill Team is a youth organization that trains people in highly disciplined, precise routines, which combine military movements with street choreography. Their goal is to use this structured program to keep kids away from violence on the streets. So I’m collaborating with the choreographer of the South Shore Drill team, Asher Waldron, to see how the two systems of order can be superimposed, with the drill routines transforming the lines of the Miesian grid into fast-paced movement.

I sought you out as a respondent because you’ve written extensively about intersections between art and architecture, and about what happens when mediums come together, specifically in Kissing Architecture.

Sylvia Lavin: I’m really struck by the fact that this is a federal building and we’re in an era in which the issue of black bodies and the state is so prevalent. I’m going to assume that you have things to say about it. It seems to be one of the issues under some pressure in contemporary architecture and that already indicates the shift in the field from that moment to this one.

BR: Yes, that is a really important dimension of the piece. On the one hand, this piece is definitely about confronting the norms of the Federal Plaza, both its political and architectural norms. That space is a protected zone of Federal authority and an architectural landmark, so it holds expectations of non-threatening behavior to both political and architectural authority. In this project, the South Shore Drill Team remakes those conditions using their specific medium of choreography and drill routines. These are young people who are often made to feel unwelcome both in spaces of government and spaces of architectural prestige. But during this performance, they own that space and they’re remaking it as new authors there.

So that political content is certainly there in the piece. But at the same time, I don’t want this to be a one-liner political statement. That’s in part why I didn’t lead with that. I think it’s richer if there are layers of how we use architecture and movement to structure bodies and those layers come out differently for each viewer as they are watching the piece.

That’s what the title is about. It references a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks about African-American soldiers in WWII. In the voice of these soldiers, she describes how they were trained to order their behavior to assume the powerful and charismatic role of soldiers. But none of that training prepared them for the lonely moment of facing death, or the “lions in the air,” as she calls it. That poem really struck me because these young people on the South Side are facing their own lions in the air — in gang violence, police brutality, random shootings — and the tools of discipline and order they are given only partially protect them from that lonely moment.

And finally, it’s been interesting to notice how it’s primarily white people who are asking for this piece to be more overtly political. The Drill Team certainly doesn’t want that. They approach the politics of the South Side by training these kids to be successful students and performers and then giving them as many opportunities as possible to travel outside of their neighborhood. So the last thing they want is an aggressive political statement or a confrontation with the government that would threaten their political and financial network. When I talked to them about the politics of this piece, it was very clear that their goal was not an activist piece but rather something that would keep building the institutional structure that allows them to actually shift the politics of the neighborhood.

SL: Just to press you on it, I think that one of the issues that has to be addressed is whether or not it’s possible to make a distinction between

the space of the political and the space of the aesthetic. I think the issue on the table is whether that distinction holds true at all anymore, and whether or not the attachment to the distinction is an issue. You clearly think that they are different.

BR: No, I strongly believe they are not separate. I think the aesthetic and the political are completely bound up together.

What’s compelling about both the architecture of the space and the Drill Team is that the aesthetics are so laden with military and political undertones. So in the Miesian space, this relentless grid creates a system of order and control. But that system goes to a point where it reaches a kind of“rationalist sublime,” as Joan Ockman described when lecturing on Arne Jacobsen. That is particularly clear in the post office where the clear span space achieves many of the conventional qualities of the sublime — in its expansiveness beyond the scale of the individual. A similar thing happens with the South Shore Drill Team. They are performing military drills with rifles, so it’s very explicitly about symbols of power and violence but they are twirling and flipping and dancing with these guns in a way that becomes celebratory and expressive. So it’s not that the political and the aesthetic are separate; I’m just interested in how the aesthetic can take the political beyond its own assumptions.

BRYONY ROBERTS is the principal of the design and research practice Bryony Roberts Studio, based in Los Angeles and Oslo. She worked in the offices of WORKac and Mansilla + Tunon before founding her own practice in 2011. She has taught at Rice University School of Architecture in Houston and SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, and is now assistant professor at the Oslo School of Architecture.

SYLVIA LAVIN is an architectural historian and critic. She wrote Kissing Architecture (Princeton University Press, 2011), and curated the exhibition Everything Loose Will Land (The Graham Foundation, 2015) on architecture and visual arts in 1970s Los Angeles. She is currently director of the Critical Studies and M.A. and Ph.D. programs at UCLA.

This is an excerpt of a longer conversation, condensed and edited for clarity by Consortia. The full text of this conversation and many others will be featured in The State of the Art of Architecture, the catalogue of the first Chicago Architecture Biennial. The book will be published by Lars Müller Publishers in November 2015.

For more information, visit http://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/exhibition/publications.

_________________________ was originally published in Chicago Architecture Biennial on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Greek architect Andreas Angelidakis discusses the life and meaning of objects and buildings in our highly networked “post-descriptive age.”

Andreas Angelidakis started making 3D prints in the early 2000s, as a way to keep a hard copy of buildings he had built in online virtual works, such as Active Worlds. As he lost interest in online communities, he got interested in these prints as autonomous structures. He quit being a professional architect and focused increasingly on 3D renderings, sculptures, and installation works that brought his training to bear on various crises in contemporary culture. Net art, historical analysis, personal politics, and architecture are all wrapped up in Angelidakis’ practice. Los Angeles-based architectural writer Nicholas Korody caught up with the artist ahead of the Chicago Architecture Biennial to talk about his current work.

Nicholas Korody: Maybe the proper place to begin our conversation is at “the end.” After all, there’s a recurrent eschatological fixation running through your work. You’ve previously described it as a “fin de siècle obsession,” which was also the title of the exhibit you curated at the Swiss Institute.

What does it mean to live at the end of the world — or after it, as you’ve said before?

Andreas Angelidakis: This week especially feels like the end of something. In the United States people are celebrating marriage equality. At the same moment, in Greece, and Europe in general, we are witnessing some kind of end of the European Union, as Greeks have been asked to choose between accepting the economic policy of the Institutions (the Troika) and exiting the EU. The possibility of not accepting the proposed measures but still stay a part of the EU seems to be diminishing quickly. The EU is putting the Greeks in a take-it-or-leave-it position, even though that’s not what describes a political union. On the one hand I want to celebrate marriage equality, but on the other hand, I don’t feel it’s really a moment for celebration. This is typical of now — things that don’t go well together are seen in the same light.

What an end means, though, is a new set of options.

NK: Something that really interests me, particularly because you are not an architect that builds buildings, is that your projects suggest a keen attunement to the life of a building. In fact, I think I read somewhere that you consider buildings to be alive.

AA: Not sure if I would attempt to intellectualize it, but I tend to see the emotional “weight” or voice of both objects and buildings. It’s kind of cartoonifying them. They become an extended range of emoticons; ways to express things in the post-descriptive age. Somehow we all use objects to express how we feel — whether that is with a cat video posted somewhere, or through Instagram.

NK: Like with your “Walking Building”?

AA: Yes, like the “Walking Building,” or “Troll,” the building that becomes disillusioned with Athens and leaves, or “Casino,” the building that self-explodes to avoid a fate worse than death. Kind of like Greece itself this week.

NK: What is it about the present era that brings objects so into focus?

AA: Images and objects are consumed much faster today, so maybe we just need more of them. I’m not sure what the “post-descriptive age” really means, I just came up with that. But it’s when you reply to a comment with an emoticon or a gif, instead of explaining something or elaborating. Same when you type “IMO” and “TBH,” images and objects are all ways to abbreviate, to keep up with the speed of things. Buildings are by nature slow to come along, so it’s an interesting challenge.

I started experimenting with this in the late 1990s when I was working with online communities, like Active Worlds. You needed to be online to design and build and the main tool was copy-pasting existing object and building parts to make your own thing. Because this was before broadband, you had to keep paying to stay online, and that was one of the incentives to build quickly. Similarly, you had to explain your building to other avatars in a chat window, and nobody wants to wait for you to type in a long explanation.

This led to buildings that were self-explanatory, like “Cloud House.” It was also an attempt to make things memorable and, to use a terrible word, “viral.” The first world I built was a community for artists and architects that we ran together with artist Miltos Manetas. But at some point the hosting expired and I ended up losing about forty buildings. In the next 3D world project, a place called Neen World in 2003, I decided to 3D print each building so that I would have some kind of hard copy, something to remember the building by once the online original was gone. Back then 3D printing was brand new and companies would make a print as a demo if you sent them a file. All this led to making buildings with the sole purpose of 3D printing them — memorabilia or tchotchkes that were commemorating nothing at all. They just became building emoticons to post on Instagram.

NK: Earlier you mentioned that the Internet was a beginning or even the beginning. Tell me about the first time you logged on and what’s happened since.

AA: I was at Columbia doing the MSAAD program in 1994, and at the start of the semester they gave us email addresses. I had no idea what it was or what to do with it. We were told to look for stuff online; the browser was Mosaic, and the search engine was Lycos. But what was most inspiring was that every Friday night, we would get on the computers and play Marathon, a kind of networked shoot-em-up. The fact that people could be in different buildings on campus and meet up in the same online space and kill each other was eye-opening. Then I signed up for the first ever paperless studio, and my section was taught by Keller Easterling. It was both a revelation not to be working with any pen or paper, but also to be exposed to Keller’s thinking. Our studio was radically different from all the others, because we were thinking with the computer rather than using it as a drawing tool. So, thinking about what it means to be networked, what the “economy” is, etc. I did a project about a house in Athens that changes sites along a suburban street, and changes itself along the way. I had gathered all the material for the project before the semester started, and was lucky enough to happen upon Keller, who was a crucial influence in my thinking with and about the computer.

ANDREAS ANGELIDAKIS trained as an architect at Columbia University. He switches roles between artist, curator, and architect producing models, films, ruins, installations and smoothing out the borders between the real and the virtual. He is inspired by the city of Athens, and his work deals with the notion of ruin, be it ancient, contemporary, or imaginary. Recent exhibitions include The System of Objects: The Dakis Joannou Collection Reloaded by Andreas Angelidakis at the DESTE Foundation, Athens (2013); Every End is A Beginning at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2014); and Fin de Siècle at the Swiss Institute, New York (2014).

NICHOLAS KORODY is a writer and visual artist living in Los Angeles. He is a contributor to Archinect and Reset-Dialogues On Civilizations, a non-profit organization that promotes the intercultural understanding between East and West. His practice, mainly video art, deals within the margins of architecture.

This is an excerpt of a longer conversation, condensed and edited for clarity by Consortia. The full text of this conversation and many others will be featured in The State of the Art of Architecture, the catalogue of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial. The book will be published by Lars Müller Publishers in November 2015.

For more information, visit http://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/exhibition/publications.

_________________________ was originally published in Chicago Architecture Biennial on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Bureau Spectacular founder goes on a discursive journey through Los Angeles with architect Neil Denari to discuss architectural representation and the city

Jimenez Lai is the principal of Bureau Spectacular, a Los Angeles-based studio that imagines other worlds and engages with architecture through stories. His first manifesto, Citizens of No Place, was published by Princeton Architectural Press, and he has won various awards, including the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Debut Award at the Lisbon Triennale. Lai is participating in the Chicago Architecture Biennial this fall.

Neil M. Denari is an architect and author based in Los Angeles, whose office NMDA is dedicated to exploring the worlds of architecture, design, urbanism, and global cultural phenomena. Denari has held visiting professorships at UC Berkeley, Columbia, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Texas at Arlington, and he is a tenured Professor in the Architecture and Urban Design Department at UCLA.

Over the summer, Chicago Architecture Biennial team caught up with the architects for a drive around sunny Los Angeles to talk about the city, drawing, and architectural representation.

Neil Denari: You’re not a driver yet.

Jimenez Lai: I don’t have a car.

ND: Are you the new breed?

JL: I might be. I mean we did the math and it seems like not driving is more economical than driving.

ND: So, were you surprised by the overcast weather when you came to L.A.? What were the mythologies that you came with that either still exist or have been just completely eliminated?

JL: I have been out in L.A. several times before moving here and some of the feelings I had before was ‘well here’s an off-the-menu type of city,’ in the sense that you don’t really know what’s going on but there are some great things you could order. You just have to know ahead of time.

ND: I love that analogy, the menu…

ND: There’s still politics, and there’s still hierarchy and all of that, but one of the reasons why I’m here and why I stay here is because you can reinvent your position within that field every day, all the time. And it’s interesting you being downtown…. It’s not necessarily the best psychological center.… There is no psychological center of L.A. It’s where you are, and who you’re with. It’s in this car.

JL: I’m a fan of a decentralized story arc. If the composition itself is made up of anecdotal parts and it demands the readers to find the parts and then project themselves into what they find…

ND: Yeah.

JL: I think that that’s the kind of composition I’m drawn to — a city like this, where it is everything all over everywhere, with multiple centers of gravity.

JL: We’ve never really talked about drawing. Can you talk about that drawing of yours that you auctioned off at UCLA? I tried to purchase but didn’t get it.

ND: Well, It’s interesting to think about drawing because I think you really draw and I don’t anymore. I used to, I do some by hand but I’m probably more informed by photography, like Bernd and Hilla Becher, than by architectural modes of representation. So that particular drawing was interesting. I’ve been doing these note book drawings since the late eighties. Those were my musings and they’re hieroglyphic and they’re usually not even connected to a specific project. They’re notes and meditations. I treat them very very carefully so I don’t do any scratchy stuff. Everything is like a very specific drawing.

I like the idea of getting rid of the hand, so that it’s just black lines on the page and there’s no uniqueness at that level. It gets to my aphorism of ‘I’ve never been interested in drawing, only designing.’ So the deadpan part of Ed Ruscha’s work is that there is nothing that’s supposed to get between you and the content, no style of drawing. Black lines on a white page and what you take in from it is the decision to make those lines that way. And that’s the way I’ve always drawn, sort of very mechanically…

JL: I also struggled with architecture a little bit when I started out because it was not my first choice. My first choice was always cartoons. It was what I wanted to do with my life.

ND: I didn’t know that.

JL: And, you know, listening to my rational side and influences from my context at the time, I felt like, ‘Let’s look into something useful.’ Eventually it translated into my current practice.

So I think that going to the medium of comic book was maybe going to something that felt more natural to me, at the time. It was an easier way for me to speak and I think in doing so I gained a lot of practice.

If a comic book page itself is a plan, are there gutters that we walk around? Is that a corridor? Are the frames themselves programmed rooms? Can we even ask questions, then, like the constitution of program in that room? Are we not allowed to eat here at all? What are the rule sets of that room?

ND: If I think of some of your drawings where the page is like a poché and then you’re going to put an episode in, and then a wormhole to get to the next episode, that’s super literary, you know very Lewis Carroll, Thomas Pynchon…some weaving of a story and the ellipses between things.

That’s an interesting way of thinking about L.A. because L.A., while it doesn’t have walls, it also has limits that make location and episodes happen. This is especially true when you get in your car and drive around and the idea of being able to make a project as field as opposed to a build up of spaces and cores and events that do or don’t run in a linear fashion or make sense or cohere.

BUREAU SPECTACULAR, led by Jimenez Lai, imagines other worlds and engages with architecture through stories. Bureau Spectacular’s installation White Elephant is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The studio designed the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014.

NEIL DENARI is an architect and author based in Los Angeles. He started his practice in New York in the 1980s, exploring the technical and formal impact of technology on architecture. His office NMDA is dedicated to exploring the worlds of architecture, design, urbanism, and global cultural phenomena. In 2011, Denari received the Los Angeles AIA Gold Medal. He is professor in the department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA.

This is an excerpt of a longer conversation, condensed and edited for clarity by Consortia. The full text of this conversation and many others will be featured in The State of the Art of Architecture, the catalogue of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial. The book will be published by Lars Müller Publishers in November 2015.

For more information, visit http://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/exhibition/publications.

_________________________ was originally published in Chicago Architecture Biennial on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The British design collective is bringing its collaborative, self-starting approach to the Chicago Architecture Biennial this fall.

Since coming together in 2010, London’s eighteen-member Assemble has approached architecture with a uniquely holistic agenda.

Part architecture office, part workshop, and part outreach organization, the group has often reframed architectural design problems as opportunities to build collective cultural spaces for communities in London and around England. Assemble has worked on affordable shared workspaces, adventure playgrounds, theaters, housing, and other projects by collaborating with the public to produce collectively enjoyed spaces of value.

London-based curator and critic Beatrice Galilee sat down with Giles Smith and Amica Dall of Assemble to discuss current projects, the evolution of their distinctive practice, and their plans for the biennial.

Beatrice Galilee: From your first project, the Cineroleum, onwards it seems that being part of the construction or having a role in its fabrication is fundamental. Is that something that defines you as a firm?

Assemble: We’re having this interview surrounded by other people in Assemble who are making tiles and lampshades for houses in Liverpool. It’s fundamental to the way we understand the act of building. We see material experimentation and making things ourselves as a way of learning how they should be made, or could be made differently.

We are working on projects that don’t have expansive or elaborate budgets so we look for ways that economic materials that could be made to work harder. It’s about the joy of making — the thing that made Assemble happen in the first place. That’s something that is quite enabling. It is a different way of living in the city.

BG: Did that love of making, 1:1 and craft come out of your experience studying at Cambridge?

A: Some of us studied together, but it would be a little too simplistic to say that our practice has a singular educational background. The fact is some of us studied philosophy and literature, some studied African history. The making came about as a means to an end, and a reaction to the work most of us felt that we were doing within conventional architecture practices. When you’re making a project yourself, the only constraint is what you’re physically able to achieve. You make decisions based on who can be there, who can make what. It’s a different relationship — working at things from a distance. It’s also a much more thorough education than any of us would otherwise have had.

BG: What does it mean to you that you’re all able to contribute such different levels of expertise and engagement in the idea of architecture?

A: Assemble is the combined interests and capacities of the people within it. Completely and totally. And that is the way we see architectural practice. People are quite interested in the idea that we are coming from outside the profession into practice and it changes the way we work, but for us architecture is a broad church and people have broad interests within it. It doesn’t feature in the way we see our role. It’s a testament to how varied and changing everyone’s approach to architecture is. I don’t think you’d be able to tell the architects from the non-architects. Apart from drawing skills!

BG: I’ve been in New York for a little over a year now and I haven’t come across any type of practice — art, architecture, design or any melding of the three — that resembles yours. It occurred to me that you are a very British type of firm, working in a paradigm of regional development and socially-driven projects that is very specific to this time in that country. Would you agree?

A: Most of our projects are British in the sense that they are very much of the place that they are made in. Our first couple of projects were both situated in very particular conditions in London — The Cineroleum took over an abandoned petrol station and Folly for a Flyover inhabited a motorway undercroft. They were both self-made opportunities, created with an agility and a quantity of work that is hard to muster as a formal architecture practice. Both projects were self-motivated, built and run, but both also had some financial assistance from arts organizations, a form of funding that we’ve continued to use as our practice has developed. When we were starting out, we felt that there was some help available — although not from the usual channels for an architectural practice — but that we had to invest an incredible amount ourselves to turn it into something.

BG: And finally, what have you got planned for the Chicago Biennial? Is it your first U.S. project?

A: It is our first project in the U.S., but it’s certainly a British project if ever there was one! It has developed out of our Baltic Street Adventure Playground in Glasgow, where we’ve become very interested in giving children the opportunities to build — using real tools to build relatively large and functional structures. The installation in the Biennial will be about this, and about how we can support and cherish this essential part of children’s education.

ASSEMBLE is a design and architecture practice based in London. Established originally to undertake a single self-built project in 2010, it has developed into a diverse practice while maintaining a cooperative structure that is able to be both agile and critical in its urban interventions. Their work focuses on using design as a tool to improve social and cultural life, with attention to experimenting and making. Assemble has been nominated for the Turner Prize 2015.

BEATRICE GALILEE is Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Previously, she curated the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale and co-founded The Gopher Hole in London.

This is an excerpt of a longer conversation, condensed and edited for clarity by Consortia. The full text of this conversation and many others will be featured in The State of the Art of Architecture, the catalogue of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial. The book will be published by Lars Müller Publishers in November 2015.

For more information, visit http://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/exhibition/publications.

_________________________ was originally published in Chicago Architecture Biennial on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An in-depth look at the Lakefront Kiosk Competition Winner and three kiosks jointly designed by Chicago architecture students and world-renowned firms

The shoreline of Lake Michigan has always played a central role in Chicago’s urban identity. During the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, architect Daniel Burnham sought to incorporate the lake into the fairgrounds, and his 1909 Plan for Chicago proposed to reclaim the entire length of the lakefront as a place of leisure for all inhabitants of the city — an idea realized during the 20th century. Today, the lakefront is a celebrated and heavily used public space that is a major destination for both visitors and local residents.

The inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial promises to make a lasting impact on the city of Chicago through the commissioning of several new permanent structures for the city’s shoreline. Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently unveiled designs for four lakefront kiosks to be built and opened to the public on the occasion of the Biennial, a first for an event of this kind.

One kiosk design was decided through an international competition organized in partnership with the Chicago Park District and the City of Chicago. Juried by acclaimed architects David Adjaye (Adjaye Associates), Jeanne Gang (Studio Gang), and Sharon Johnston (Johnston Marklee), along with Biennial Artistic Directors Joseph Grima and Sarah Herda, the Lakefront Kiosk Competition attracted 421 entries from 40 different countries. A selection of these entries can be seen on the Chicago Architecture Biennial Pinterest.

ChiDM on Twitter

We're excited to see the amazing entries for the @chicagobiennial Lakefront Kiosk Competition! http://bit.ly/1IsVhJP

Ultimately, the Jury awarded the top BP Prize to the Rhode Island-based Ultramoderne for their “Chicago Horizon” proposal. The Prize includes a $10,000 honorarium and a $75,000 budget to realize the design.

The Chicago Architecture Biennial commissioned three more pavilions that invited talented up-and-coming designers from Chicago and around the world to collaborate with students at the three major architecture schools in the city. As Architizer notes, “One of the most exciting things in Chicago — and part of what is fueling the momentum of the Biennial — is the schools there,” which are “thriving under strong leadership that has attracted some of the top design talent in the United States and the world.” Supporting this position, Kunlé Adeyemi of the Lagos and Amsterdam-based NLÉ Works worked with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chilean duo Pezo von Ellrichshausen paired with the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Chicago firms Paul Preissner Architects and Independent Architecture collaborated with the University of Illinois, Chicago.

In recognition of the strength of the proposals submitted to the competition, the jury also named three finalists and honorable mentions for entries that presented exciting new visions for shared urban spaces. Below, we take a more detailed look at the winning competition design, the school kiosks, and other recognized entries.

The Rhode Island-based team stood out among 421 entries with a proposal for an ultra-sustainable and low-cost flat-roofed structure for the lakefront

“Chicago Horizon” takes cues from modernist masterpieces as well as the land art movement, which is a constant inspiration for the winning team. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Ultramoderne is composed of Yasmin Vobis and Aaron Forrest, who collaborated with structural engineer Brett Schneider. The Kiosk will be on display in Millennium Park during the Biennial and installed permanently at Queen’s Landing, across from Buckingham Fountain.

“We were excited to see a team use the opportunity of the kiosk to create a generous public space that could facilitate programs and catalyze new activities on the lakefront,” said Sarah Herda, an artistic director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Ultramoderne’s objective was to forgo flashy detail and instead to “create the largest wood roof possible — to demarcate a zone of the city for all to enjoy.” The design echoes the flat horizon of Lake Michigan while hearkening back to the legacy of Mies Van der Rohe’s iconic works in Chicago.

The team also cites the film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames — part of which was filmed on the Chicago lakefront.“We like the flatness and rationalism of Mies and some of the flexibility of the Eameses,” team member Yasmin Vobis told Dezeen.

Architects Newspaper on Twitter

An expanse of sustainable timber clinches the @chicagobiennial Lakefront Kiosk Competition http://blog.archpaper.com/2015/08/expanse-sustainable-timber-just-clinched-chicago-architecture-biennials-lakefront-kiosk-competition/#.VcTUyS9ykzM ... pic.twitter.com/vScIEgOVri

“Chicago Horizon” is aggressively economical, and its designers deliberately prioritized public space above the need for a splashy aesthetic statement. As the Architect’s Newspaper notes, their pavilion “uses cross-laminated timber, a new lumber product that some structural engineers call carbon-negative for its ability to displace virgin steel and concrete while sequester the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide during its growth.”

The kiosk will contain a small lending library with architectural books, topped by a large, flat roof made of cross-laminated timber covered in a layer of gravel to protect it from Chicago’s strong lakefront winds. Visitors to the viewing platform will stand at chin-height with the roofline and events like book talks and panel discussions will be held underneath.

The BP Prize-winning design was received enthusiastically on social media: among others, fellow Biennial participants Studio Gang and David Neustein of Otherothers tweeted to congratulate the winners.

Studio Gang on Twitter

Congrats, @Ultramoderne! The @chicagobiennial is less than two months away and we can't wait! https://twitter.com/chicagobiennial/status/628926969451835392 ...

David Neustein on Twitter

Cats on a large flat roof. Loving @Ultramoderne's winning entry in the @chicagobiennial lakefront kiosk competition! http://www.dezeen.com/2015/08/05/ultramoderne-wins-lakefront-kiosk-competition-chicago-architecture-biennial/ ...

Several up-and-coming international design firms are pairing with Chicago architecture schools to design three new pavilions for the Chicago lakefront

The three school kiosks represent an unprecedented push in the United States to invigorate Chicago’s architectural scene with new ideas from home and abroad. For a generation of students and up-and-coming designers, the collaborative design process offered the chance to work together on a full-scale design-build process with for the best clients a designer could ask for — the people of Chicago.

Jaimes Leggett on Twitter

Next level architecture collaborations http://bit.ly/1gKVYbL #Collaboration #Architecture #Design

“The kiosks that are out there now are nothing to celebrate,” said Bob Rejman of the Chicago Park District in the Chicago Tribune. “Over time, we could replace the sort of ramshackle nature of the ones that are out there with significant little pieces of art.”

Michael Kelly, CEO of the Chicago Park District, told Dezeen “Even modest contributions at the scale of these new kiosks can significantly enhance cultural life on the lakefront,”

The school kiosks will be installed at Montrose Beach, North Avenue Beach, and Harold Washington Playlot Park, where Chicagoans and visitors alike will be able to take advantage of the kiosks’ shade, amenities, and charm.

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects — which engages with design at all scales, from body to environment — has partnered with NLÉ, led by Kunlé Adeyemi, an architect, designer and urbanist with a track record of conceiving and completing high-profile projects internationally. His recent work includes the ‘Makoko Floating School’, an innovative, floating structure prototype located on the lagoon heart of Nigeria’s largest city. Based in Amsterdam and Lagos, Adeyemi’s research focuses on providing sustainable solutions for Africa and other developing regions.

Through their collaboration, Adeyemi and SAIC have produced “Rock,” a pop-up pavilion composed from the raw and historic limestone blocks that once protected the city’s shoreline. Sited at Montrose Beach, the kiosk is conceived as an “infrastructure box” consisting of materials and technologies that are found at or belong to the local environment. The composition’s resilient limestone and concrete elements can be uniquely assembled each time to suit different locations, vendors and uses along the lakefront: by providing shelter while contributing to the shoreline protection.

Jonathan D Solomon on Twitter

What about the School Kiosks? @saic_news and @NLEWORKS propose to ROCK Montrose Beach! #aiachat pic.twitter.com/kFWaNorNWK

The Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture, a school that explores the role of architecture, urbanism and landscape within the global conditions of the 21st century, have collaborated with the Chilean firm Pezo von Ellrichshausen. Founding partners Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen were curators of the Chilean Pavilion at the 2008 Venice Biennale, and their work has been widely published and has been featured in exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Biennial of the Americas, and the Museum of Modern Art.

With IIT, the architects have proposed “The Cent Pavilion,” a forty-foot tower meant to convey silent and convoluted simplicity. It repeats the same angled design over and over, resulting in an opaque monolith. According to the architects, when its commercial function ceases at the summer’s end, the kiosk will complement the verticality of Chicago’s iconic skyline year-round.

1:1 Design Studio on Twitter

Yup... Definitely going to try to travel for this. http://ow.ly/QxAHD

Paul Andersen of Indie Architecture and Paul Preissner of Chicago-based Paul Preissner Architects collaborated with the School of Architecture at UIC, a institution energized by an environment that enjoys animated polemics and debate. Andersen’s Indie Architecture explores new ways of disseminating architectural and urban ideas, while Preissner’s projects draw on academia, architecture and art, to produce innovative and accessible projects. Andersen and Preissner have previously collaborated on the large-scale temporary installation “Two Barns” at the 2013 Biennial of the Americas in Denver.

Together, the architects and UIC have proposed “Summer Vault,” a lakefront kiosk meant to dynamically accommodate a number of programs. It consists of basic geometric shapes — a 12-foot diameter barrel vault, a parallelogram, triangles — combined to create a curious, freestanding hangout within the park. The interior of the skewed vault is divided into two triangular spaces — one enclosed by expanded metal screens and doors, and one open to the air but still within the vaulting. This two part plan allows for commerce and community to occur simultaneously.

Six finalists and honorable mentions were selected among the competition entries for the strength and conceptual brilliance of their designs

Out of the 421 innovative proposals the Lakefront Kiosk Competition attracted, the jury named three Finalists and awarded three Honorable Mentions.

Architect Magazine published an in-depth look at one of the Finalist designs, “Behind the Curtain,” by Thomas Kelley, Ryan Palider, and Charles Paros. According to the architects, the proposal aims to present itself in a manner that tries to conceal rather than embelish its monumentality, iconicity, and symbolism. “Like a small child’s not-so-inconspicuous hiding spot,” the project is intent on “concealing itself poorly.” Indeed, the kiosk’s attenuated cylindrical form, composed of a simple base and frame, is simply obscured with a thinly-meshed veil. “Only after peeling back this veil, now a curtain, does the project reveal its function. Alas, it is simply a kiosk. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Singapore-based Lekker were also named Finalists for their design, a shingled farmhouse form that morphs into an open archway, inviting passersby to take advantage of a cozy interior space. Lekker stated that the proposal attempts to express Chicago’s “unlikeliness: that chutzpah, the strange emergence of something intricate and sophisticated in a hostile environment.” The form and materials also simultaneously invoke the earliest versions of the Chicago Prairie home, some of Chicago’s most iconic postmodern moments, and the Chicago tradition of finding playful expression in “bad” or “wrong” materials. More details and images accompany a story on the project in Architect Magazine.

TRU Architects of Berlin earned a spot among the Finalists with a simple, translucent roof structure that shades a patio and provides room for relaxation and events. Featured in Architect Magazine, the proposal featured a latticework canopy that would emanate a soft light at night. Notably, the entire construction is built of ordinary squared timber battens, which are recycled through the process of building. The kiosk is conceived as a low-cost building that shows the constructive potential and beauty of timber structures, along with providing an example of material-saving and ecologically worthwhile building methods.

UIC Architecture on Twitter

Kiosk by faculty Ryan Palider + @ThomKelley was named a finalist in the @chicagobiennial competition via @ArchDaily http://bit.ly/1hjMcgN

The Honorable Mentions were Sydney-based architect Guillaume Mazars; fala atelier, a young firm based in Porto, Portugal; and Berlin architects kollektiv-a.

Mazars’ entry “Ambient Light,” featured in Designboom, aims to highlight the unique ambience of the waterfront, where sky meets earth and the horizon is exposed and illuminated. The kiosk, using lightweight materials, steel tubes, and fabric cables, forms a circle of translucent fabric that diffuses light, delimits space, and generates privacy. Inside, a suspended fabric ring provides shade while the center is open to expose the sky.

designboom on Twitter

guillaume mazars' ambient light chicago lakefront kiosk proposal http://www.designboom.com/architecture/guillaume-mazars-ambient-light-chicago-architecture-biennial-lakefront-kiosk-proposal-08-07-2015 ... #designboomreaders #arch pic.twitter.com/DZeMsLOTjB

fala atelier focuses on the production of small-scale architecture and rhetorical competition proposals. In the words of the architects, their entry, the “little kiosk artistically considered,” is an architectural assemblage. “It is flexible enough to suit most cultural and commercial programs but always retains the same architectural expression: the protection of a warm timber roof, the efficiency and luminosity of a glass box, the spatial punctuation brought by an arbitrary column. All its elements correspond in a loose and playful way. The kiosk refuses both architectural abstraction and easy categorization.”

Based in Berlin, the kollektiv-a team works under the motto “Architecture needs Poesie.” Their proposal draws from the idea of the wall, a fascination that starts with ancient ruins and temples — objects that are destroyed, but which still live in our memories. The kiosk forms a long, black wall that separates two worlds — the hectic, crowded streets and the tranquil sea. “Here, separated and far away from the routines and nuisances of daily life,” the architects note, “the wilderness of the ocean becomes a fenced garden.”

“The City of Chicago is the place where modern architecture was born — and this exhibition will help us build on our tradition by showcasing ideas that match our city’s ambition and aspiration,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “Through this collection of projects, Chicago will continue leading the way when it comes to showing how cities can think in different ways to create, design and build the great cities of tomorrow.”

See more of the coverage below:

Archdaily: “Chicago Architecture Biennial Announces Lakefront Kiosk Winners”

Archinect: “Team Ultramoderne’s “Chicago Horizon” wins Chicago Lakefront Kiosk competition”

Architect: “Chicago Horizon”

Architect: “Behind the Curtain”

Architect’s Newspaper: “An Expanse of Sustainable Timber Just Clinched the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s Lakefront Kiosk Competition”

Architizer: “Why the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s Kiosks Will be CHI-IL As Heck”

Artforum: “Winner of Chicago Architecture Biennial’s Lakefront Kiosk Competition Announced”

Building Design and Construction: “Ultramoderne wins Chicago Architecture Biennial kiosk design competition”

Bustler: “Team Ultramoderne wins top prize for Chicago Lakefront Kiosk competition”

Chicago Tonight: “The State of the Art of Architecture in Chicago”

Chicago Tribune: “Chicago Architecture Biennial to bring ministructures along the lakefront”

Curbed: “Chicago Lakefront Kiosks Bringing Pop-Up Architecture to the City This Fall”

Designboom: “Guillaume Mazars’ Ambient Light Chicago Lakefront Kiosk Proposal”

Divisare: “Chicago Horizon: Chicago Architecture Biennial Lakefront Kiosk — Winning Project”

Dezeen: “Ultramoderne wins competition to design lakefront kiosk for Chicago Architecture Biennial”

Dezeen: “Architects team up with universities to design kiosks for Chicago Architecture Biennial”

DNAinfo: “Lakefront Kiosks Coming to Grant Park, Montrose Beach, Hyde Park”

Wallpaper: “Perma-pavilions: Chicago Architecture Biennial to transform waterfront kiosks”

_________________________ was originally published in Chicago Architecture Biennial on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On the occasion of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, Ultramoderne’s winning design will be built and permanently installed on the Chicago lakefront.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced today that Ultramoderne, a collaboration between architects Yasmin Vobis and Aaron Forrest and structural engineer Brett Schneider, won the BP Prize in the Lakefront Kiosk Competition.

The competition called for the design of a new kiosk for the city’s lakefront, and is part of a broader initiative to enhance the lakefront that will result in three additional kiosks designed by emerging architects in collaboration with local schools of architecture.

Titled “Chicago Horizon,” Ultramoderne’s kiosk design started by asking, How much kiosk can you get for $75,000? Chicago Horizon probes this question through a quest tobuild the largest flat wood roof possible. Using Cross-Laminated Timber, a new carbon-negative engineered lumber product, in the largest dimensions commercially available, the kiosk aims to provide an excess of public space for the Architecture Biennial and Chicago beach-goers.

When ultimately placed at its permanent location along Lake Michigan in Spring of 2016, the kiosk will house a commercial vendor, and will provide shelter and a new public space along the lakefront. Ultramoderne’s kiosk will be on display at Millennium Park during the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Ultramoderne is a collaboration between architects Yasmin Vobis and Aaron Forrest and structural engineer Brett Schneider. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, and closely connected with the Rhode Island School of Design, the Ultramoderne team members bring together an extensive range of experience in architecture, design, and engineering at a broad range of scales.

Vobis and Forrest, who together lead the architecture studio Ultramoderne, have extensive experience working for leading architects in San Francisco, New York, and abroad. Schneider is senior associate at Guy Nordenson and Associates Structural Engineers in New York, where he has led projects in collaboration with SANAA, the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Johnston Marklee, and other leading practices across the globe.

_________________________ was originally published in Chicago Architecture Biennial on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.