SO – IL » Reflect

44. Workspheres
2013
Reflect

The office is no more. We work anywhere, anytime. We don’t even think we are working, we don’t really have professions any longer – just different things we do, sometimes alone, sometimes with others we are connected to, through a myriad of mutating platforms and dynamic structures. We meet, tweet and charette in, lounges, clubs, [...]

40. Focusing in the fog
2012
Reflect

Our train cuts through a desaturated dawn. Hazy, fleeting images of a carefully constructed landscape flash by in various shades of gray. The track runs perfectly parallel to an unswerving canal. Perpendicular to this connective corridor, endless rows of similar trees rhythmically emerge out of the thick of the mist. More and

38. Transhistoria
Jackson Heights, Queens, 2012
Reflect

Jackson Heights in the center of Queens is a quintessential melting pot. With 138 languages spoken and a community of people from around the world, the borough is considered one of the most diverse neighborhoods in New York. How does one find calm and solitude in such multifarious environment? Largely with roots

34. Full Circle
2011
Reflect

It is a seminal year for architecture in America. Minoru Yamasaki completes the Twin Towers, the tallest buildings in the world. Louis Kahn delivers a canonical pair as well - the Phillips Exeter Academy Library and the Kimbell Art Museum. Yale gets its independent Architecture School, located in a bush-hammered concrete

28. Abstainability
2011
Reflect

In a brief moment of anxiety, not uncommon in our current role of “Promising Architects,” a condition that allows for the quick recalibration of one’s own position before the “show is on,” I felt we should consider “broadening our appeal.” How can our firm, SO – IL, become more attractive to more clients now that [...]

25. Voracious Fast
2010
Reflect

Now that we have entered a phase of involuntary fasting, any anxiety that the architect is destined to turn into the marginalized hunger artist of our time, soon to be replaced by an omnivorous beast – be it a construction consortium, plan-buro or engineering mammoth - seems foolish...

23. The house that used to fly
2010
Reflect

As the Narita Express, the train between airport and city, dips under the Sumidagawa River on its journey toward Tokyo Station, it passes a monstrous looking structure; a colossal spaceship on massive piers, festooned with a demonic oculus and lined with pulsing red lights...

20. Relations
2009
Reflect

Oedipus and Kronos never reached Japan. For in this country it is not inevitable that a young architect instantaneously commits patricide upon leaving his master, nor is it given for a master to impair his “renegade’s” prospects.

16. Conversation with Ivan Chermayeff
2009
Reflect

After going through the entire process of designing his house with SO-IL, Ivan Chermayeff suffered some of the misfortunes of the recent financial crisis. This conversation explores his hopes for the house, and his sentiments after choosing to not proceed with the project.

13. Learning from Japan
2008
Reflect

Besides the release of Ready to Die by the Notorious B.I.G. (‘94) and SMLXL by Rem Koolhaas (‘95), few events during my student years impacted my development as an architect more than ...

8. Cutting Fabric
2008
Reflect

The opening of a new Yoji Yamamoto boutique in Manhattan early February went almost unnoticed by the progressively more architecturally minded New York public...

6. The Culture of Decongestion
2008
Reflect

Be it well documented examples as Detroit and the eastern part of Germany, or lesser known cases elsewhere, vast regions in the world are being left abandoned as a result of globalization, natural disasters and demographic trends. This is not a new phenomenon; however...

4. Beautiful Rough
2007
Reflect

Domus #909: The New Museum of Contemporary Art opened its new building in downtown Manhattan to the public in early December. The roughly 6000m{2}, eight-story structure of loosely stacked boxes provides the institution a perfect platform for the advancement of new ideas, in a time and place where they [...]

2. New Sobriety
2002
Reflect

A recent interest has developed in the phenomenology of diagrams in mathematics, cognitive science, and architectural theory. Traditionally, the diagram is used as a rational tool for analysis and design in these fields, as an abstract representation of a more complex system. [...]