The Brooklyn Rail

The architects Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg, who founded their office SO–IL in 2008, are important figures in New York City architecture. They make it look easy, but they’re doing something hard—helping New York change its mind. They look at everything from the beginning. Their work finds its own way rather than sliding into preexisting types. But SO–IL does have a precise reaction to the city, seeing architecture as a layering process from the exposed world to the intimate one. The housing buildings like 450 Warren are angsty against NYC norms like the interior corridor. The arts buildings like Amant don’t act like pretend warehouses. New York City is learning alongside them.

Nile Greenberg (Rail): Where are we right now?

Florian Idenburg: This is our home. We moved here fifteen years ago and gut-renovated it, adding larger windows. We’re sitting at this big aluminum table. “Jeez… a meeting room table,” our kids said when they saw it. In a sense, there’s little boundary for us between life and work.

Jing Liu: We are currently building our office next to the house. This is connected to this thought. How do we solidify a certain security? In the US, architecture is a precarious act. You’re at the whim of larger market forces all the time, forces a million times bigger than our small practice can handle. How do you create a bit of stability and some room to experiment, so that we’re not just going from one contract to the next? We are creating a context that will give us the room and space to think about, practice, and build in a way that feels more natural.

Idenburg: We chose to be in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard district, which is a non-residential area with few grandfathered homes and many empty lots. This house used to have an abutting carport with an adjacent lot that was too small to develop commercially. We combined the two lots to build a workspace. We chose that over moving to Manhattan and renting an office. The building will become a home for the office right next to our house. In hindsight, we moved here fifteen years ago because we subconsciously knew we wanted to build our office, but we didn’t have the means to do so at that time.

It will be more of a studio than an office. It’s very public-facing, so we see it not so much as an interiorized “work-from-home” office, but a place where people are welcomed into our world. A six-foot-wide alleyway separates the home and office, but already there are ideas that the table we are sitting on in our house now will be where people from the office will eat, and that we will cook for visitors out of our kitchen.

Rail: Once the studio/office/context is built, how do you imagine living and working here and being in the studio?

Liu: Well, life changes. You can predict to a certain extent, but not precisely. First of all, we have two years until our youngest daughter leaves the house. Until then, the house will remain private. The design of the studio is very simple: two twenty-foot-tall floors stacked, each with a mezzanine. The first mezzanine will serve as the office’s main entrance. The second floor will be an open workspace, with private offices and meeting rooms on the second mezzanine.

The ground floor is a vast open space, and we have numerous ideas for it. It opens onto the alleyway, so we will invite other people to use it or program it sometimes. We will use it as a model shop and display space when not in use for events. It’s a flexible space where we can hopefully experiment and play around a bit. We have a nice kitchen in there, designed by Sam Chermayeff, which is not very conducive for cooking, but very conducive for socializing.

Idenburg: We both share the idea of architectural culture as something to protect and safeguard, and we hope for the space to contribute to that as well. The studio may become an institute where you can see an architecture show, a pop-up bookshop, or a dance performance. I grew up in the Netherlands in a culture where architecture was heavily subsidized; every town has a center for architecture, and physical drawings are everywhere. It may be nostalgia.

Liu: I also like the idea that we’re not an institute: we don’t have a mission, we don’t have a program, but we just want to be the host.

Rail: Will you exhibit your work at the “SO–IL institute” in 2030? Will it house your archive, as other architects have done?

Idenburg: In 2008, the first year of our office, David van der Leer, who was a curator of architecture at the Guggenheim at the time, was doing a project on archives and asked us, “How do you think about your archive?” We had only just started, but that question was excellent because it made us realize early on that your archive is the only thing you control as an architect. The buildings are there, but the archive is the purest version of your intentions. The question helped us develop a mindset where we began thinking about the value of all the things we do.

Rail: Early on, you committed to New York. However, it also seems that you’ve committed to uncertainty, something you’ve discussed frequently in nearly all your projects. Architecture is a context, a container for uncertainty, an organizational apparatus for the future. How does an architect deal with uncertainty?

Idenburg: Our collaboration is very complementary—Jing’s DNA and upbringing and my DNA and upbringing are very different, so we can navigate a lot of unknowns with a wide range of perspectives. I just reread Stan Allen’s “From Object to Field: Field Conditions in Architecture and Urbanism,” where he suggests that we cannot assume a preconceived idea for execution. The notion of “field conditions”—anticipating things in the field and going along with the flow—has been very natural to us. There is no master plan—it was not intentional to be in New York, or to have a family.

Liu: As an architect, you have to be on your toes. You have to change your position in the field. It’s exhausting, but we’re both curious people. When things don’t go the way that you expect them to go, rather than plowing through it, we both tend to become more curious. Can we look at it from another perspective? Can we go to this other place and then view it from a different angle? That’s why architecture is interesting, because it’s hard to project something out into the world from inside yourself. As architects, unlike most artists, we’re always given tons of constraints: context, programs, budget, waterproofing. And then, you have to come up with your interpretations of these constraints, and that’s what makes it interesting.

Idenburg: One of our clients famously said, “I’m paying you for a set of drawings, not a concept.”

Rail: You’re saying there are two clients: one is the person who pays for the drawing set, and the other is the medium. I understand that there is an ambition to stay well within the medium, and use projects to push its boundary with form, craft, material. What do you think it means to be architectural?

Liu: There are a few things that every project needs to talk about. One is context and typology. Why evolve a specific typology in a particular context, and why this typology specifically? The other is indeed the material project. We transition between glass and steel to elastic, stretchy materials, and then to heavy concrete and masonry. We also consider the concept of “wetness versus dryness” of materials, a phrase coined by Kevin Lamyuktseung from our office.

Idenburg: The “wet” materials are the ones that reach out to the future, and the “dry” materials are the ones that keep you in nostalgia. This helps us think about material, not just in the service of the form, but as a carrier of character, voice, and life.

Currently, I’m particularly obsessed with Concrete Masonry Unit (CMU) blocks. Our new office is all made of eighteen-inch blocks, a special order. Rumor has it that in the 1970s, the masonry union in New York went on strike for higher wages. As a compromise, the union bosses insisted on lengthening the standard sixteen-inch block by two extra inches, thereby increasing the linear feet of wall that could be produced from a single block, making construction faster. All the molds had to be changed. So now there are 18 by 6 by 8 inch blocks, only in New York. We thought it would be fun to incorporate that history in our building.

Jing’s point on “typology” suggests that we usually start from an existing type, but there is also spatial creation beyond simply evolving what already exists. What makes space architecture, unlike interior design, is imagining new spatial experiences. For a building to qualify as architecture, it must consider a spatial experience that is purposely sequenced and orchestrated. We strive to discover new forms, even in our temporary projects, such as those in Bruges or Venice, rather than relying on existing ones. There is also a strong link between building type and labor, such as the division between residential and commercial contractors, as well as basic separations of materials and trades. You don’t see CMU or steel often used in residential construction. If you extend this idea further, how do you blend the domestic and the institutional palettes?

Rail: One of the consistencies of your work in Brooklyn is that it has courtyards. That’s a typology. The arts campus Amant, in north Williamsburg, is a perfect example, as it also abstracts the warehouse/garage/shed types to hybridize the institutional and industrial elements in a manufacturing neighborhood, producing a museum typology.

Idenburg: Your point makes me think about the artist’s loft, a place for fabrication that became a home, or the white cube gallery, and the history of New York galleries being in industrial buildings. This hybridization of a workspace that becomes domesticated is not new, but instead emerges from the 1960s–70s appropriation of industrial sites for inhabitation. These industrial buildings were initially designed to accommodate large machines, and as a result, they could also accommodate large sculptures.

Amant certainly is playing with the industrial context in which it is. But that isn’t necessarily a foreign context for displaying art, or for artists to inhabit, due to this history. It’s very different from a traditional museum or picture gallery framework, which is intended to transform a palace into a space for art. Amant is not trying to be a palace for the arts.

Rail: It is a well-detailed institution.

Idenburg: Yes, we spent a lot of attention on its detailing. We had a long discussion about good detailing the other day. Fancy detailing is a luxury, but quality detailing should not necessarily be. It’s fair to say that Amant was about building and positioning a new institution.

Rail: Many of your projects have a real roughness, which is also admirable, and it’s not due to missing good detailing. In Brooklyn, you’ve completed three or four significant housing projects that have been highly successful. Which is to say, people haven’t been radicalized against them, which is a feat in itself. These all have a courtyard, a connection to the outdoors that suggests a particular attitude towards living.

Idenburg: Growing up in the Netherlands, collective housing blocks are where architecture lives. The idea of how to live together is more important than the private home. We’ve always wanted to design multi-family housing, but not in the typical way found in the US.

We participated in Mayor Bloomberg’s competition for micro-units in Kips Bay, the one that nARCHITECTS won. In Mexico, we were able to construct Las Americas, social housing for migrant workers. This project enabled us to incorporate ideas such as a single-loaded corridor and courtyards. It gave our future clients in the US the confidence that we could create a residential building that stands out.

From a real estate perspective, there was excitement around exploring new approaches in the rigid New York market. This wouldn’t have happened if a large, established developer had asked us to do it. Tankhouse, the clients for the Brooklyn housing projects you mentioned, wanted to do things differently. All the projects we completed with them are located on corner lots. This creates a zoning opportunity to build more volume than your Floor Area Ratio (FAR) allows, resulting in a very “porous” building. Our project, 450 Warren, for example, appears quite normal from the outside, despite its size. However, inside, the building opens up dramatically. The following projects, 9 Chapel St and 144 Vanderbilt, do something similar, although with very different formal outcomes. The fourth project, currently under construction at 450 Union along the Gowanus Canal, has 158 rental units, with 27 percent designated as affordable rentals.

Liu: If the city is to evolve, it needs to find its new ways of building housing. I grew up in China. In pre-modern China, 90 percent of the buildings had a courtyard, because there was no real estate pressure. Today, many people live in compact apartments, often within mega-blocks that feature a courtyard between the skyscrapers. It’s similar to the Brooklyn donut: the space in the middle of the typical brownstone block. In our book In Depth: Urban Domesticities Today, I wrote about how empty space is so innately human, an undefined void that becomes a buffer between things. People need “donuts,” these spatial moments of release. We are trying to determine at what point the density of our buildings can still be maintained, and at what point it begins to fall apart.

Idenburg: Ultimately, much of it relates to the interface between the city and the building’s edge, the connection to civic life. Our buildings have extensive facades because they have a large contact surface with the surrounding environment. The greater the real estate pressure, the more it drives the need for thinner and more compact designs. Our residential projects in Brooklyn may be challenging to implement in Manhattan due to this pressure.

Rail: People have begun to think of housing as one of the most critical architectural acts. We’re facing serious unaffordability and need policy changes to increase housing stock, lower costs, and help people stay in place. But the danger is that this quantification eliminates quality. Maybe this is where architects need to jump in.

Idenburg: One thing we thought about a lot is the idea not of the apartment, but of the home. At 450 Warren, each unit has multiple window orientations, sometimes on four sides. Multiple directions let you understand the time of day. Every unit has three outdoor spaces: a balcony off the living room, a balcony off a bedroom, and an outdoor front door where you can store your bike or stroller. According to New York City code, you can’t have a non-climatized room, so it had to be a balcony. Since the circulation is very open, you can also see people on different floors. We replaced handrails with a stretched metal mesh. This gives you a sensation of almost falling, but it is safer than any other place.

Liu: How you arrive home is also essential. You’re not opening a heavy door and being greeted by a doorman in an interiorized space with a low ceiling and a double-loaded corridor. Instead, you go through a screen, so the delineation between public and private is very gentle. Then, you go up the staircase or take the elevator and arrive at your floor, where corridors are still open and connected to this semi-public space. And then, you arrive at the front door. I believe that being more conscious and intentional about arriving home slowly is essential for our mental well-being.

Idenburg: These buildings have very few amenities because the city itself is the main amenity. Projects where you never need to leave the building, with co-working spaces, gyms, bars, and game rooms are like a Corbusian cruise ship. They create poor urban environments, so we are cautious with this kind; it’s not ideal for the city overall.

Rail: Museums are a big part of your work. What is your contribution and perspective on designing spaces for art?

Liu: You said that we are taking ourselves very seriously when we make these art spaces, which is true. We felt that in our generation of architects, culture should no longer be the “Acropolis,” a temple on the hill, or an enclosed palace where people are at a distance, where you have to bow down to culture. We believe that cultural buildings need to be integrated into our everyday context. Maybe that’s where the idea of the immense outdoor canopy at UC Davis or Williams College, or why the warehouse campus as typology emerged. These are typologies that are more conducive for people to connect with art without feeling a sense of traditional monumentality. We haven’t had to figure out what to do when it gets really big, but I think the question of right sizing with cultural projects is also so important.

Idenburg: The responsibility of the architect in making an art space is to stage an encounter with the art as something profound and meaningful, or, building on Jing’s argument, about slowing down. How can you integrate these encounters more into everyday life, or use them to elevate the ordinary? We don’t need to destroy the institution. However, it is crucial to consider how, in today’s age of distraction, we can create a space where people can genuinely engage with a work of art.

Rail: So, how do you do it?

Idenburg: One way is to give attention to the sequence, to lay out a journey. We are working on a project that is a micro-museum, featuring five galleries at the Pavilions at Art Omi in Chatham, New York. It’s organized around the idea that there is one piece per room, and you can spend fifteen to twenty minutes alone with each piece. We conceive it, starting with people leaving their homes in New York and driving up to this place. Why go here? What do you seek? How do you relate to nature? How do you move from one space to the next? It’s about thinking through the journey of people and art, and how to orchestrate it. That has to do with the way light enters, or the detail between the wall and the floor.

Rail: Simultaneously, you’re also describing this immediacy to have art in the context of the city or of its site. But also this intentional act to create a series of thresholds, maybe starting from your home. I think you are doing less the former and more the latter, more layers getting you to a work and and less the open door. I’m reminded of Lisson Gallery in London’s immediacy between the city and the art—Tony Fretton’s revolutionary moment to drop all the layers, a mere fourth-inch threshold between the art and the city. You are also taking a very deliberate approach, I think, but instead of building these thresholds, there is a gentle filter from the city to the work, which I believe benefits very particular forms of art.

Idenburg: It makes me think of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, which immediately opens onto the street, or Marcia Tucker’s New Museum on the Bowery with its storefront window. I wonder if the idea of “art on the street,” which originated mainly in the 1960s, remains the most effective way to convey a message. I feel that architecture helps create a little distance from the immediacy because the immediacy right now is very commercial.

Liu: There is a danger in translating a digital apparatus to a physical thing, one-to-one. Architecture and spatial experience have different faculties. It’s dangerous when you just translate that to a glass facade. I’m not sure if we’re reacting to that condition. No matter the program, at the end of the day, we’re creating a relationship between the city and something else that is personal and intimate. The layers are not just public/private, but consist of multiple gradual levels and scales of intimacy. What is public? What is private? You don’t think there is a fundamental difference in when you feel exposed versus when you feel protected?

The protection, the container, the envelope, or whatever we call it, is not simply a matter of “State A” vs. “State B.” There is a transition, and we’re more interested in that transition. That’s where architecture is. The gallery, the bedroom, and the living room are all defined and prescribed already. But it’s in the in-between space that architecture lives.

Idenburg: Kukje Gallery is a good example. It’s a plain box to sell art. That’s a gallery. And then there’s the city, and the whole project lives exactly in that space in between. How do you deepen that space? You put the institutional space straight on the street, and you create depth, because that’s where experience can take place. We want to make physical, tangible architecture.

Liu: Some artists need white walls, and some artists don’t want the white walls; there are the streets and the courtyards outside. At Amant, they display a lot of artworks in the courtyard as well.

Idenburg: At the Shrem Museum, we created a grand canopy over a public plaza. It’s an open structure to be occupied by any artist or member of the public. Art also needs to live on the edges of these institutions, not just within the interior box. The entire building should be a site for art.

Rail: I’m trying to theorize your work. You’ve made a lot of performance pieces, art that is exposed and dramatically unmediated: a dance performance in a greenhouse, a cultural storytelling event in community zones of Queens. The irony is that as architects, you’re focusing very hard on the edge of all your projects, redefining the edge as a disciplinary question.

Liu: It’s an interesting question you’re posing: how do you mediate art if the thing that’s most defined is the thing that is most exposed? However, in our architectural projects, they cease to be mere edges and become architectures.

Idenburg: We should not say art can only live in one specific place. There was a Berlin artist who had an installation at Amant, and she started to play with the architecture. She introduced new radiators and doubled the thickness of the walls. The site, the architecture, was the trigger for the project. One of the first artists at Amant installed a work in which water dripped from the ceiling with a bucket. There are numerous examples where art and architecture work very well together when the artist doesn’t stay within the confines of the white cube and instead riffs on the architecture itself. That’s when hybridization starts to occur and ambiguity begins to emerge, prompting people to ask questions. That’s what I think is relevant.

Liu: One of our friends told us that we shouldn’t talk about uncertainty and ambiguity as architects, because no one wants to pay for uncertainty. But for us, not explicitly stating things allows more possibilities and allows things to happen.

Rail: You also have a unique approach to material, and your projects use a breadth of materials. Next door, we saw a mockup of this building’s facade, a concrete canvas that hardened as actual fabric. And then, Kukje Gallery is a chainmail facade which cloaks everything. So, what do you think about material?

Idenburg: In some cases, it operates on a lower register. But we’re not interested in material for its own sake. Much of the concept of cloaking and softening revolves around this deeper edge. Our first lens for considering materials is its effect: what does it allow us to do, and how could it assist this higher register that we’re discussing? How does it create the layering? How can we calibrate it?

A second perspective is understanding that we don’t build our buildings; other people do, and they are the ones who assemble materials. This means not necessarily asking the brick what it wants to be, but asking the mason how the brick prefers to be and then exploring that.

For Amant, a campus comprising four separate buildings, we aimed to identify the connections between the individual structures. What do they share, and where do they differ? Certain materials are consistent throughout the four buildings. The datum of the soffit is also a uniform material. However, they are materially different. One is brick, as it’s an adaptive reuse project; another is made of cement block; and a third is made of concrete. They’re all “dry” materials but are fundamentally quite different. The challenge lies in completing four buildings simultaneously. We were interested in the relationships and composition between the buildings.

Liu: Materials are also fun to experiment with. As an architect, if you don’t like to play with materials, you’re missing a fundamental part of being an architect. If you don’t do that, or think about that, there is a laziness in the building itself that you can feel. It makes a lazy building.

Rail: In general, why are buildings usually the same material everywhere? Given one building, why is it so often the same on all four sides?

Idenburg: This is a fair question. In some way, the moment of the iconic building has reduced the palette per project to foreground form.

Liu: There are also economic realities—the more trades involved on the job site, the higher the building costs. Sometimes, it’s more economical to have fewer trades and mockups because there are fewer details to resolve. Additionally, often there is only one project architect. It’s much more difficult to coordinate when you ask for different languages to be in one building, compared to using different materials. If you’re saying that even Amant, with all the various materials, details, and assemblies, is still considered one language, then to have multiple languages in the building you need to have multiple teams working on them.

Idenburg: We are sometimes accused of inconsistency, which is quite interesting because each project is very different. Each project is an exploration of a specific material. When looking at certain architects, they’ve developed a language centered on a particular material—Tadao Ando, or even Frank Gehry, have limited palettes. Although we restrict our palette within a project, people often don’t see this as part of the studio’s overall work between projects. It’s been difficult to explain this critique, but it exists because we work with a wide variety of materials.