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The day before his inauguration, Barack Obama made an appearance at the Washington, DC, homeless-youth center Sasha Bruce House, pulling down a stubborn curtain and rolling cerulean paint on the walls according to a redesign by New York-based architecture firm HWKN. And while studio namesakes Matthias Hollwich (the HW) and Marc Kushner (KN) admit their $1,500 scheme merely created cleaner and more private spaces, the outpouring of responses to the project pegged it as revolutionary. Scores of TV viewers contacted their SoHo office to learn how they, too, could construct a more socially responsible reality.   MORE >>

The day before his inauguration, Barack Obama made an appearance at the Washington, DC, homeless-youth center Sasha Bruce House, pulling down a stubborn curtain and rolling cerulean paint on the walls according to a redesign by New York-based architecture firm HWKN. And while studio namesakes Matthias Hollwich (the HW) and Marc Kushner (KN) admit their $1,500 scheme merely created cleaner and more private spaces, the outpouring of responses to the project pegged it as revolutionary. Scores of TV viewers contacted their SoHo office to learn how they, too, could construct a more socially responsible reality.

Since 2006—when Hollwich, a 38-year-old German, and Kushner, a New Jersey-born 32-year-old, met in the office kitchen of progressive Berlin-based architect Jürgen Mayer—the partners have wanted to get more people talking about their craft.

That method entails making observations. Instead of performing a typical young-architect renovation, in 2008 HWKN lined part of a 4,000-square-foot Manhattan apartment with built-in storage that changes volume to accommodate an extensive Judaica collection and other trappings. Although built from familiar materials such as MDF, cork and bleached ash plywood, the so-called Wall Unitizer articulated its homeowners' lifestyle more expressly than the foyer table, breakfront and desk they had originally requested.

Their method also means taking positions. For the annual Evolo Skyscraper Competition in 2006, HWKN's Skygrove tower features multiple legs resembling a mangrove tree, which can better withstand flooding from rising seas. "It's too late to avoid global warming, so it heightens awareness of that reality," Hollwich says. Indeed, Skygrove personifies HWKN's concept of "econic" design—creating green-minded icons that galvanize people to embrace sustainability in every aspect of their lives.

But the pair's growing body of work is not limited to the physical realm. "Architecture is about communication," Kushner says. "And to communicate, every tool is at your disposal." Their latest tool is Architizer, an online social networking site and project database for the architecture community. Echoing a familiar theme, Kushner says, "It's a way to reach a greater population, to show them what we do and to make architecture consumable instead of an out-of-reach art form."

Following a 2009 commission at LA's Virgil Skilled Nursing Center, the pair has set its sights on geriatric environments. In addition to overseeing the mid-April New Aging Conference at UPenn, HWKN is on track to complete a retirement facility in Africa's Ivory Coast for elderly priests in 2012. Residences are arranged in a village configuration, an on-site school allows priests to teach the local population and other radically communal gestures all banish the ascetic spaces that today define the end of life. It promises to position the duo as architects who are as sensitive as they are fearless. hwkn.com   << LESS

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When Zaha Hadid won the commission to design a new art museum in Rome's Flaminio neighborhood, Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao was two years old, Zaha's office was twenty-strong and the world was heading into a boom period. Ten years later, the 312,000-square-foot MAXXI (National Museum of the 21st Century Arts) seems at first glance like just another starchitect project. Instead, the MAXXI, developed and run by Italy's Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities as a way of bringing the nation fully into the current century, is a leap forward in museum architecture as remarkable as Gehry's Guggenheim.   MORE >>

When Zaha Hadid won the commission to design a new art museum in Rome's Flaminio neighborhood, Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao was two years old, Zaha's office was twenty-strong and the world was heading into a boom period. Ten years later, the 312,000-square-foot MAXXI (National Museum of the 21st Century Arts) seems at first glance like just another starchitect project. Instead, the MAXXI, developed and run by Italy's Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities as a way of bringing the nation fully into the current century, is a leap forward in museum architecture as remarkable as Gehry's Guggenheim.
The project transforms the idea of a museum from a central and coherent block and moves it in a new direction. "We wanted to compose a building out of a field of elements," project architect Gianluca Racana says of the MAXXI, which is built mostly from concrete, steel and glass, and incorporates galleries for art and architecture produced since 2000. The building also includes an auditorium, library and conference rooms. "It's a space you have to explore, visit and navigate before getting a full grasp of it," he says.
One of the firm's biggest challenges was in engineering the concrete facade, a surface that also functions as the galleries' interior walls, requiring the material to incorporate both strength and sleekness. Overall, the coiled, snake-like building exemplifies motion—forward and back, up and down, twisting and turning.
This playfulness sets the building apart from so many others that have opened in the post-Bilbao craze. As much as Gehry’s curved-titanium ship was a marker for so-called helicoptered-in structures, the MAXXI, which appears to grow out of the ground, is the perfect architectural expression of our diversified and ultimately elusive museum culture. maxxi.beniculturali.it, zaha-hadid.com   << LESS

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Romanesque. Georgian Revival. Collegiate Gothic. Mention any style that swept across America’s built landscape in the last 200 years, and you will probably elicit emotional responses. But the glass boxes that have come to define modern architecture? Not so much. "Over the past century, architecture has become exceedingly intellectualized, sometimes eclipsing emotion and a range of aesthetic sensations," says Mark Foster Gage. "Our work is trying to reinvigorate the way architecture resonates with people."   MORE >>

Romanesque. Georgian Revival. Collegiate Gothic. Mention any style that swept across America's built landscape in the last 200 years, and you will probably elicit emotional responses. But the glass boxes that have come to define modern architecture? Not so much. "Over the past century, architecture has become exceedingly intellectualized, sometimes eclipsing emotion and a range of aesthetic sensations," says Mark Foster Gage. "Our work is trying to reinvigorate the way architecture resonates with people."
 
Before founding the firm in 2002, Gage worked for New York-based Robert AM Stern and Takenaka in Osaka, while his partner Marc Clemenceau Bailly did stints with Ferguson & Shamamian and Peter Pennoyer, both in New York. Together, they run Gage/Clemenceau Architects from a muscular storefront in Manhattan's Lower East Side. It's a long way from Notre Dame, where the friends earned their bachelor's degrees in architecture and where they accumulated the historical knowledge that informs their work today.
 
However, building a bridge between old and new architecture does not mean replicating the past. Rather, Gage/Clemenceau's complex plans, intricate forms and undulating surfaces are largely unprecedented, and the principals achieve these jaw-dropping geometries with digital programming and fabrication. The pair frequently works with software maker Autodesk to ensure programs like Maya and Mudbox—both originally used for Hollywood special effects and computer-generated imagery—and the automotive-design tool AliasStudio are suitable for architectural design.
 
The results of Gage/Clemenceau's mission include installations such as this year's Valentine to Times Square, a giant heart constructed of laser-cut stainless steel, translucent Corian and computerized LEDs that stood temporarily in Duffy Square. "The heart project was an unabashedly cheerful exercise for our office, allowing us to use the newest design technologies, advanced materials and robotic fabrication techniques for the express purpose of producing, well, a little bit of love," Gage says. In the pipeline for 2010, the firm's first freestanding house and a line of jewelry should stoke emotions further.
 
Yet, Gage also notes that the studio creates products and spaces not merely as aesthetic exercises. The curving, lace-like facades submitted to the February 2008 competition for the Estonian Academy of Arts were intended to forge visual links between occupants of the building’s elevated public courtyard and passers-by. And for a recently completed three-bedroom apartment overlooking Central Park, Gage/Clemenceau differentiated rooms with various undulating walls and patterned three-dimensional surfaces. As Bailly puts it, "We’re trying to inject a little more beauty and emotion into the form-versus-function equation." gageclemenceau.com   << LESS

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"Here I'm fascinated by the possibilities—that architects can experiment and not necessarily report their essence to society." So says the Netherlands-born Florian Idenburg, about designing architecture in the United States. Idenburg does so with his wife and partner Jing Liu from a Brooklyn studio named Solid Objectives - Idenburg Liu (SO-IL).   MORE >>

"Here I'm fascinated by the possibilities—that architects can experiment and not necessarily report their essence to society." So says the Netherlands-born Florian Idenburg, about designing architecture in the United States. Idenburg does so with his wife and partner Jing Liu from a Brooklyn studio named Solid Objectives - Idenburg Liu (SO-IL).
 
Idenburg studied (with United Nude founder Rem Koolhaas) at the Technical University in Delft, while Liu graduated from Tulane, but they first crossed paths in Tokyo in 2000, where both worked for the illustrious architecture studio SANAA. But it was New York that pulled them together for good. Idenburg had been spending time there since 2002, overseeing SANAA's Glass Pavilion in Toledo, Ohio, and its New Museum for Contemporary Art in lower Manhattan. Liu arrived that same year to work for Thomas Leeser. They founded SO-IL in 2008, and just months later Derek Lam Company cofounder Jan-Hendrik Schlottmann tapped the firm to design the SoHo headquarters adjoining Lam's SANAA-designed flagship store.
 
The interior renovation counts as SO-IL's most visible commission to date. "We wanted to emphasize this landmark building," Idenburg says of the historic, 11,000-square-foot former kickboxing gym. "We also wanted to create fluidity while allowing three contradictory elements to have their own spaces." Walls measuring no more than two-and-a-quarter inches in depth and sporting a few sliding doors provide just a hint of division between Lam's showroom, administrative and workshop activities. All previous layers were stripped away, and mechanical rooms, circulation and restrooms were relegated to a single enclosure. The nook was clad in a shiny gun-metal epoxy that reflects daylight deep into the space.
 
"Usually we come up with one architectural device that defines a project," Idenburg says. A forthcoming 45,000-square-foot private art museum near The Hague stands on the threshold between sand dunes and a polder and balances undulating and rigid forms to "emphasize the sense of being on the edge," he describes. And regarding a wafer-like wedding chapel that should be completed in Liu’s hometown of Nanjing, China, in 2011, Idenburg says, "It was the ultimate opportunity to propose something only trying to be beautiful."
 
"We make sure a project is not just about following a method nor aesthetic preference," Liu notes. "If we had established ourselves in the Netherlands or China, one of our two opposites would’ve taken precedence over the other." so-il.org   << LESS

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Since their days at Yale, Eric Clough and Eun Sun Chun have perfected architectural storytelling. Take their discussion of a mixed-use high-rise wound in a gracious exterior stairway. It is neither technical nor intellectualized, as the two imagine a CEO moving from the parking garage to his 30th-floor office or a grandmother visiting the museum tenant.   MORE >>

Since their days at Yale, Eric Clough and Eun Sun Chun have perfected architectural storytelling. Take their discussion of a mixed-use high-rise wound in a gracious exterior stairway. It is neither technical nor intellectualized, as the two imagine a CEO moving from the parking garage to his 30th-floor office or a grandmother visiting the museum tenant.
 
In that spirit, 212box has deputized building and interior commissions as gateways to narrative and other disciplines. The Singapore accessories store Into, for example, is lined in aluminum panels sandblasted with a wallpaper whose almost-hidden figures are chewing gum and breaking other local decorum laws; the pattern is also incorporated in shopping bags and store collateral. "You can’t help but design things that are not quote-unquote architecture, especially on retail projects," Chun says. For the Christian Louboutin boutique opening in the Miami Design District next month, walls will feature thousands of wood tiles indented with Braille and 400 additional derivative symbols. "If you look hard enough, you can always find some secret message that may or may not be intended for you," Clough says. "It tells a story, literally, but I can’t tell much more than that, or I would ruin the surprise."
 
In what is arguably their best-known work, a Fifth Avenue apartment renovation completed in 2006, the designers fully express their love of puzzlement. Messages are embedded in radiator grills and decorative moldings scattered among the 4,200 square feet. Two doorknockers combine to open secret compartments in a dining credenza, and the most patient sleuths will discover, behind the wall panels in the den, a poem the homeowner wrote for his family.
 
212box's approach to architecture is understandable—and no wonder addictive shoemaker Christian Louboutin, bespoke clothier Seize sur Vingt and filmmaker Tatiana von Furstenberg are loyal clients. It’s unlocking their spaces that’s the brainteaser. Perhaps that's why Hollywood has embraced the design studio so enthusiastically. JJ Abrams bought the rights to The New York Times 2008 story "Mystery on Fifth Avenue," featuring the cipher-like apartment, while Clough and Chun are working on their own film version of that and other projects. "We've invented objects and things that maybe we can't make now, but we can make tomorrow," Clough says. "With film you can decide that it is tomorrow." 212box.com   << LESS