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The seventh episode of The Architects Series has been displayed on February 2019 in Milano and it's about WEISS/MANFREDI, the New York studio founded by Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, a couple in life and work.
In the studio’s particular vision, architecture should be involved in constructions of all kinds; the accentuated distinctions between the disciplines of architecture, art, ecology, landscaping, engineering and urban planning limit the state of architectural design, precluding new paradigms for contemporary living. The two founders began working together to question this limited vision, and their work has become an opportunity to consider, in both physical and disciplinary terms, a much vaster territory in which to express their creative potential.
Aware that a project never starts out with a tabula rasa, Marion and Michael approach every context as a new architectural chapter offering plenty of potential in which to create new opportunities, new visions and new scenarios. Every project, whatever its scale, is fertile ground for testing the capacity of a broader definition of design, imagining a critical practice that is an active tool for moulding contemporary culture.
The studio’s most important references, the utmost expression of their modus operandi and personal vision, include the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, a project that puts back together and enhances what used to be an abandoned and contaminated part of the city; the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Visitor Center, in which architecture and landscape are merged with flowing curved lines; the University of Pennsylvania Center for Nanotecnology in Philadelphia, proposing interaction between the academic world and the city; the Tata Innovation Center, redefining Roosevelt Island as a symbol for Cornell Tech’s international standing; and the recently-completed Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park, a new model for waterfront resilience and urban social life.
Their unusual projects have earned WEISS/MANFREDI a place of prominence among architectural practices that redefine the relationships among construction, landscape, infrastructure and art: the Architectural League of New York calls them one of the “emerging voices” on the international scene, and they have received numerous prizes and acknowledgements including the Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal, the New York AIA Gold Medal, an Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum National Design Award for Architecture.
