September 26, 2022
NEW YORK, New York, September 26, 2022 – The Center for Architecture is excited to present New Practices New York, opening on Friday, September 30, 2022, at 6:00 pm. The exhibition will showcase the six winners of the most recent cycle of the competition, offering a glimpse into the future of New York City’s architectural landscape. The opening of New Practices New York will also serve as the unofficial launch of Archtober 2022, New York City’s architecture and design festival.
THE COMPETITION
Representing more than 5,700 members, AIA New York is the oldest and largest chapter of a 90,000-member national organization. Since 2006, the New Practices New York competition, organized by the AIANY New Practices Committee, has served as the preeminent platform for recognizing and promoting young and innovative architecture and design firms in New York City.
For the eighth cycle of the biennial competition, launched in 2020, the committee asked applicants to consider the theme, “Pause,” prompting them to take a moment to reflect on how they define themselves and what they aspire to contribute to their communities.
In February of 2020, a panel of jurors, composed by Emily Abruzzo, AIA, Principal, Abruzzo Bodziak Architects; Sean Anderson, Director of the B.Arch. Program, Associate Professor, Cornell AAP; Felix Burrichter, Editor/Creative Director, PIN–UP Magazine, Karolina Czeczek, Principal, Only-if; Christopher Leong, Assoc. AIA, Founding Partner, Leong Leong; and Shohei Shigematsu, Partner, Director, OMA, selected the six firms:
- BRANDT : HAFERD
- Bryony Roberts Studio
- Citygroup
- GRT Architects
- New Affiliates
- ANY
THE EXHIBITION
Originally meant to open in July 2020 but postponed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, New Practices New York will present the six winners of the 2020 competition to the public. The exhibition will showcase built, unbuilt, and speculative work by the firms through photography, diagrams, and renderings. The highly innovative and cutting-edge work by these young, emerging practices will provide audiences with an opportunity to glimpse into the future of New York City architectural landscape.
The work of the firms is complemented by interviews that dive into what drives their practices and how New York City influences their work. The firms also reflect on how the collective pause of the pandemic will impact the future of architectural practice, giving the competition’s theme of “Pause” new meaning.
New Practices New York will be on view through February 25, 2023.
THE WINNERS
BRANDT : HAFERD
BRANDT : HAFERD is reflective by nature—a young practice whose work began with the design of interactive public installations across New York City. The firm is committed to new forms of civic and client engagement, to inventing ways of being together, and to expanding its territory in search of new audiences for design. Identity is a persistent theme in the firm’s work. Feminist, black, queer, and parallel approaches to practice imbue their work and provide a critical lens. BRANDT : HAFERD describes its scrappy use of digital and analog tools in urban sites as “guerilla research” exploring imaginative re-toolings of POPS and low-density and underutilized lots. Co-production, collective drawing, and exchange are meaningful to the aesthetic and ethos of the practice. An interest in scale, the land, and regional architecture continues to bridge the studio’s practice and teaching. Who has access, and how sharing can lead to health, are motivators when they re-think co-living, intergenerational exchange, and even representation.
Bryony Roberts Studio
Bryony Roberts Studio approaches design as a social practice. Integrating methods from architecture, art, cultural heritage, and community engagement, the practice explores how the built environment shapes and responds to complex social conditions. The studio approaches every project with site-specificity, learning not only from the layers of built fabric and infrastructure but also from local histories of political struggle and urban change. Bryony Roberts Studio collaborates with community groups, cultural historians, and artists to produce projects that activate the public realm and celebrate overlooked narratives. Expanding the palette of architectural techniques, the studio experiments with performance, film, and events to address the nuances of social histories and to inspire participation from non-architectural audiences. Bryony Roberts Studio’s work emerges in close dialogue with research projects and publications and has gained support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation, the Getty Foundation, and the American Academy in Rome. Roberts teaches both architecture and historic preservation at Columbia University GSAPP, where her design studios and seminars focus on issues of gender, race, and labor.
Citygroup
Citygroup (not Citigroup) is a collective of architects and artists committed to using their professional skills to defend the city as a place of inhabitation for all people. Located in a storefront on the Lower East Side, the collective challenges the structural and cultural forces that shape the normative practices of architecture. Citygroup recognizes that architecture is frequently beholden to conservative authority, both economic and political, and recognizes that today’s architectural profession may not be able to confront the global housing crisis or protect the city from unbridled profit-driven development. As a collective, they are unwilling to defer to the status quo and believe they must interrogate the conditions that subjugate, alienate, and appropriate architecture. This monumental task is pursued through design projects, exhibitions, installations, and discussions. Participation defines membership in Citygroup, as they seek to value the authorship of the collective over that of the individual. Unlike a conventional architectural practice, there are no principal architects. Through deliberation, and occasionally contentious discourse, the collective establishes an enclave for the production of theory and strategy that supports an alternative approach to architecture and a life of dignity for everyone in the city.
GRT Architects
GRT Architects engages, innovates, and communicates by building. The firm has grown its practice exclusively with built work commissions and collaborations. As architects who studied history before design, the firm leaders find truth more interesting than fiction. They look for what makes projects unique and craft responses that they hope are both surprising and appropriate. GRT Architects leverages technical, visual, and historical literacy to bring more to a project than a client asks for. The firm’s love and respect for history yields an understanding that the past is layered and compatible with new work, executed confidently in its own voice. Founders Tal Schori and Rustam Mehta met in third grade and proceeded, unintentionally, to attend the same university and architecture school. After working at different firms for seven years, they decided to start a business together.
New Affiliates
New Affiliates is an award-winning New York-based design practice led by Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb. The practice learns through building and experimenting with forms and materials to blur the lines between volume, structure, decoration, and surface. Alongside commissioned work, New Affiliates initiates projects and collaborations that focus on reuse within a context of material excess, particularly as it relates to current standards of practice, considering the afterlives of materials including the hundreds of bins of drywall produced by art-world institutions and large-scale high-end mockups. Through this work, they have made built ongoing collaborations with city agencies (the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation and the NYC Department of Sanitation), community groups, and the building industry. The firm has completed a range of work from interiors to ground-up projects, as well as a series of collaborations with institutions including New York’s Jewish Museum, the Shed, and the Canadian Center for Architecture. They have exhibited in venues from Storefront for Art and Architecture to the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Onassis Cultural Center, and their work has been published in several design magazines internationally.
ANY (formerly NILE)
ANY is a modernist design studio. While pursuing antiquated lessons about structure, utility and beauty, the firm also works in the present and stays aware of what is interesting and what is good. ANY believes in encouraging freedom while maintaining structural clarity. The studio collaborates with institutions, friends, corporations, graphic designers, artists, developers, architects, fabricators, landlords, and more. The studio was started by Nile Greenberg, who also serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP. The Advanced School of Collective Feeling, co-authored by Greenberg and Matthew Kennedy, was published by Park Books in winter 2020. The book Two Sides of the Border, also by Greenberg, was published by Lars Müller Publishers in spring 2020. Before founding ANY, Greenberg worked at MOS Architects, SO – IL, and Leong Leong in New York and Los Angeles, focusing on cultural, public, and residential architecture. Greenberg holds a Master of Architecture from Columbia University.
About AIA New York
AIA New York is the oldest and largest chapter of the American Institute of Architects with more than 5,700 architect, allied professional, student, and public members. AIANY is dedicated to three goals: design excellence, public outreach and professional development. www.aiany.org
About the Center for Architecture
The Center for Architecture is the premier cultural venue for architecture and the built environment in New York City, informed by the complexity of the City’s urban fabric and in dialogue with the global community. The Center shares a home with the AIA New York Chapter and has the unique advantage of drawing upon the ideas and experiences of practicing architects to produce thought-provoking exhibitions, informative public programs, and quality design education experiences for K-12 students. It also leads New York City’s annual month-long architecture and design festival, Archtober. The Center for Architecture’s aim is to further public knowledge about New York City architecture and architects, foster exchange and collaboration among members of the design, development, building, scholarly, and policy sectors, and inspire new ideas about the role of design in communities by presenting contemporary and practical issues in architecture and urbanism to a general audience. www.centerforarchitecture.org