Test your design IQ
MANILA, Philippines – Who is the American architect and educator who founded the New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies?
He was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1932 and received a bachelor of architecture degree from Cornell University in 1955. His passion for architecture prompted him to further his studies with a master of architecture at Columbia University, as well as PhD degrees from Cambridge University.
Basing his scheme for architectural design on theory drawn from outside existing architectural dogma, most notably from philosophy and linguistics, he developed increasingly complex formulations regarding the architecture design process, especially with regard to the role of structure in contemporary society.
He was grouped with the proponents of postmodernist sensibility — the strategies of deconstruction, destructuralism, or post-structuralism. His designs, like society itself, seem to be in a state of constant emergence or movement.
The grid was the organizing principle of his earlier work, a series of rectilinear box like houses in which he investigated and articulated a variety of theoretical ideas, including the notion of “deep structure.” In these very complex, post functionalist or neo- rationalist aesthetic exercises, the architect made structure the essence of the house. Numbered rather than named (House I, House II, House III), they expressed his investigation into the nature and meaning of architectural form rather than function.
In conjunction with Richard Trott and Laurie Olin, he designed the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio State University. Completed in 1989, it both symbolized and signaled deconstructivism in architecture.
The building appears as a scaffolding, with a white three-dimensional grid that serves as the building’s spine running at an angle between two anonymous, pre-existing structures. This grid spine asserts itself as a pedestrian passageway between the existing buildings, and from it hangs the Wexner’s galleries which, along with much of the building’s space, resides underground.
His design for the Bio-Centrum, a research center for Goethe University in Frankfurt, moved beyond the reinvention of site, initiating a system of conflated duality between architecture and biology.
In 1967, he founded New York’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, and has been active both in academe and architectural circles. He wrote several books like House X, Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors, and House of Cards.
He received numerous awards for his work, including a 1993 National Honor Award from the American Institute for Architects, as well as honor from the German government for his social housing in Berlin, which was featured on a postage stamp commemorating the 750th anniversary of the city.
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Last week’s question: Who is the American-Israeli architect who’s the youngest one working on the Ground Zero project with his Reflecting Absence World Trade Center Memorial?
Answer: Michael Arad
Winner: Girlie Villaceran of Pasig City
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Text your answer to 0905-3142614 with your name and address. One winner will be chosen through a raffle of texts with the correct answer. The winner will receive P2,000 worth of SM gift certificates for use at Our Home, SM Department Store, or SM Supermarket. They can claim their prize at Our Home in SM Megamall. Call the store manager at 634-1950, 634-1943. Bring photocopies of two valid IDs and a clipping of the Design Quiz issue in which you appear as winner.
