modern interior design firms nyc

- good evening. it is my very great pleasure to be able to introduce our speaker tonight, annabelle selldorf is a fellow of the americaninstitute of architects and principal with sara lopergolo and also an alumna of syracuse university, of selldorf architects, an office of approximately 35 employees

located in union square in manhattan. annabelle established her practice in 1988 and over this relativelyshort period of time, the firm has produced aremarkable body of work that ranges from furnishingsto historic renovations, from retail stores tosingle family dwellings, from art galleries to condominium projects including a recently completed20 story residential tower. the work of the officehas been widely published

and has received numerous awards. in 2004, the firm incorporated a separate company called vica dedicated to classically modern and traditionally hand crafted furnishings including tables, sitting,lighting, fixtures and hardware. vica was originally aninterior design company founded in the 1950s by, andi think this is significant, by annabelle's paternal grandmother

and later run by her fatherthe architect herbert selldorf. tonight we are celebrating the recent publication of a monograph on the firm's impressive portfolio, published this septemberby moncheli press. following the lecture therewill be a book signing in the section in the lobbyjust outside the lecture hall. born and raised ingermany, annabelle received her bachelor of architecturedegree from pratt institute

and her master of architecture degree from syracuse university. of course i would like to believe that this foreign experience with syracuse was a defining one for annabelle. but i also know that the trajectory of her professional lifehas been broad and varied, a varied one, as evidenced by the fact that she is currently the vice president

of the architectural league, on the board of directors of the architectural league of new york and serves also on the board of the design trust forpublic space in new york, and the chinati foundation inmarfa, texas of all places. you commute on a regular basis. writing in the introductionto the monograph jane withers describes selldorf architects

as quote, a quietly robust, serious and highly articulate voice, one that is unusually groundedin human values and concerns. encore, as you will see this evening, this is clearly apparentin the work of this firm. among her earlier projects,the one that most certainly secured annabelle's reputationas a skilled designer, able to find thatdifficult balance between modernity and tradition,

was the 2001 transformationof a 1914 beaux-arts building in new york, into the exquisite neue gallery of german and austrian art. if you have not seen this project, if you have not been to this building, i absolutely recommend it to you. this project lead toother commissions such as, the acquavella galleries in new york, the hauser & wirth gallery in london.

this last one situated in abeautifully restored conversion of an edwin lutyens banking hall. i cannot imagine working in the context of an edwin lutyens banking hall, that would be a daunting experience. this rare ability toeffectively position herself between history andmodernity, owes much i believe to the bi-cultural trajectory of her life, allowing her to appreciateboth the traditions

of the old world and theopportunities of the new one. the pika house in coloradocompleted in 2006, and the wainscott andsagaponack houses on long island of 2007 and 2008 respectively exemplify her talent forcombining regional characteristics with a rigorous appreciation for modernist planning strategies and functional detailing. each project resonates with its site

in surprising ways. but it is the residentialtower at the 200 11th avenue completed just this yearthat confirms her ability to deploy these sensibilitiesat a much larger scale. the building is at once both autonomous in its skillful character and respectful in the way it accommodatesthe needed context that speaks with equalconfidence and authority to both modernity and tradition

to hand crafted finishersand advanced technology and a parking garage forthe car that brings it right to your front door. and a, and to a kind of monumentality that is also purposefullyinvested in human scale. in surveying the great body of work whether it is a palacerestoration in venice, a clothing store on fifth avenue or a condominium in chelsea,

it is this insistenceon a shared corporeality between building and bodythat characterizes the work of selldorf architects. at a time when the worldseems to be preoccupied with virtual realities, annabelle's work insists on a direct and physical encounter with her architecture. both the metric and the metier of the work begin and end with the senses.

i believe jane withers sums this up best in the last paragraph of herintroduction to the monograph when she notes that, juhani pallasmaa has written quote, "modernist design at large has housed "the intellect and the eye "but it has left the body and the senses "as well as our memories homeless." withers continues maintaining that quote,

selldorf's architectureattempts to redress this. she foregroundscraftsmanship, materiality, and human dimensions andsensations such as tactility alongside of conceptual rigor. there is undoubtedly aseriousness and respect for traditional values, but it is not in any way old fashioned. it is rather in tune with ourincreasingly heartfelt desire for authenticity, the real and the rooted.

please join me in welcomingannabelle selldorf. (audience applause) are you all set? - hello, hello hello,can you hear me, yes? 'cause i can't hear myself. good evening, thank you all for coming, i'm very very pleased to be here and also to have my partnersara lopergolo with me who you can bombardwith questions later on

about the work but also aboutwhat syracuse was really like. i myself got my master's from syracuse as randall so aptly said and i'm thereforeparticularly happy to be here and to meet you all. - [randall] annabelle. - yes. - [randall] you need to raise your mic just a little bit higher.

- it had found a verycomfortable place, maybe here. is this better? - it's getting blocked. - okay, maybe (mumbles). over here. okay, so is that any better? yes, no. in the last row can you hear me? okay.

so the title of the lectureis architecture in context and i think randallintroduced very well why we, what the reason for this title is. i did something thati've never done before that i'm a little bit nervous about, i book ended pictures ofour work with le corbusier and with mies, i hope you don't think thatthat's too pretentious, but it serves a purpose.

corbusier designed a house in 1923 that was a house for his parents and i came across this book and i thought it wasvery amusing to see that, he talks about going toswitzerland, very happily to find a site to do his parents' house. upon trying to translate the text, i realized that what he did, is he got on the train witha set of plans in hand,

however, he had never seen a site before. he knew that he wanted thishouse to be on the lake and that he wanted it to face south and he gives a very clear description of what his expectations were of the site. indeed he had actuallyproduced a set of drawings to explain how the planwas supposed to work with all of the verypractical things such as, the entrance, the door,the vestibule for coats,

the dining area, theyard to dry your laundry, et cetera et cetera. yet, a site had not yet beeneven remotely identified. as you can see, he expected it all to work something like that, view of the mountains,the lake, ahead of time, ahead of you the, facing south, ample land to take walks in and he located everything very well

as to where it should berelative to the places that he thought were important. i was fascinated with this why, because we as architects hardlyever have the opportunity to choose context ourselves and upon thinking about this, i thought, really that is not true. context merely is a tool that serves, has a purpose to focus our intention.

and so what we think of whenwe talk about contextual is really something thatleads us astray a little bit. context is really that which we decide to use as a tool to get going whether it is a programmatic context, whether it's a site, whetherit's a personal preoccupation with structural or whateverintentions we might focus on. and so i'm leading youthrough a series of projects and i'll try to stick close to my topic

and not veer away too much. i've involved quite a bit of imagery so i'll try not to linger too long. this particular project i show first because it's not in the book and i thought it'd be amusing to see but also like le corbusier'slittle house for his mother it was one of the very rare moments where we knew that we were going todesign a cabin for an artist

in nova scotia, in a place where there is neither electricity nor any plumbing anywhere available nearby because this is on an islandthat you can only get to about three months of the year. and what we knew, we didn'tknow the client very well either but what we did know from himor from them i should say, was that they wanted ahouse that was obviously for a very short, for ashort time in a given season

but also something thatwould be completely free of the ground and so,we devised a platform for these little cabins to sit on. i'm quite pleased with it because depending on the light you get very different readings of the surface, andit's a very simple house that was constructed by a man who usually fishes the rest of the year

and who had to bring every partof the building to the site by two boats. they would take it to the first shore then they'd carry it acrossa little piece of land and then they'd bringthings to the next boat and carrying it all theway down to the foot path and then carrying it up to the hill where we identified the slide. so that was verycomplicated and as a result

everything had to be done in such a way that the dimensions were carry-able. and so here it is, you see, you're facing madrid orsomething like that, right here. and the idea of this house was that you could have several cabins in which you could stay,a living cabin, oops, where is this work plan. i don't have my fingering for a minute.

there is a living cabin here,there is a sleeping cabin, there is a bolivian cabin,and this is my cabin. i was very keen on havinga courtyard and on focusing the vistas in different directions so that the main view isout to the ocean this way, however in the oppositedirection this way, you have this little pond, and there is a protected area right here from where, when you sit here,

you have diagonal views, but also you feel veryprotected from the winds and what i'm trying to tellyou here is that again, it was the context obviously exists but it was our desire to focus the view and to be very practical about the house. i didn't add to this. satur farms is a building that we did a number of years ago, alittle farm house i should say

for a couple that moved tonorth fork of long island. and in an attempt to changetheir lives, they bought a farm, they started an organic farm. they knew nothing about farming, and so i was the rightperson to help them, not. the only thing that i did know is that we wanted to do a house that related in some way or fashion to the flat landscape of long island

and that afforded you niceviews from the upper floors that was relatively modest in scope because among other things, it had to be an inexpensive house. therefore again, similarto the other cabin that we just looked at. this had to be very easily buildable, so structurally it had tobe done in a very simple way and we decided to stickto the local vernacular

using a flat siding rather than lap siding and dealing with anynumber of sort of devices such as by sliding fenestrations, introducing elements like these pergolas and trying to give dimensionto very simple shapes. and what always informsour work i would say is, the desire to be practical about things. adolph flores once said that nothing that is impractical can be beautiful

and i am really very much of, i share that opinion. this is the site plan. you can see that it'svery simply organized basically in the centerof a big piece of land with a large yard that is necessary for tractors to go back and forth between right there, and in a position tooversee these nice fields,

these simple fields flat lands. but the client was also verykeen on having a large kitchen being that he was a veryfamous three star chef and that entertainingin this very small house would be of larger importance. so the plan is very simply organized, it's essentially a square divided in four and the stair hall being the place thatholds it all together.

this little house on the other hand had, gave was an opportunityto be self referential, it was a site in long island again. in a largely wooded area where there were restrictive regulations about how much area you could clear and in other words there were no views that would inform you to dothis, that or the other thing. so in this particular case,

we were entirely self referential. it seemed to me that it wasimportant to create spaces that didn't make you feel claustrophobic in this very sort ofnarrow even dark site. but instead create a series of courtyards that would allow youto find specific areas where to be at different times of the day. again the client is a couple. so there were no childrenor no family requirements

yet, all of the normalrequirements such as entertaining space, et ceteraet cetera came into play. but i feel that this house isa really interesting solution to finding ways to deal with alocal vernacular on one hand, and a relatively easily buildable scheme. and again, we have aseries of courtyards here and here, and here. that, lead the outside to the inside and that make the different seasons

and the different times of the day particularly agreeable. this is by the way nottoo big on that home and there is obviouslya hand rail missing. we were very pleased that our clients didn't want it to do a hand rail and closed our eyes to that. there's very nice lightthat comes into the house and as i said before, thoseare always things that matter

a great deal to us, to create clear spaceswith definable proportions and readable circulationand agreeable daylight. there's an outdoorbathroom that informs the, that makes, creates a link to the pool and therefore there isa vertical circulation that goes on to different places. the pika house is a house thatwe did relatively recently in a spectacular place in colorado

where i was lucky tospend quite a bit of time and it's remarkable in asmuch that this is a small, a small town that's beenturned into a resort and where there is practically no other, well there is no real urban life around. what you're faced with isthe mountains and the trees and so when my friends askedme to design a house for them, my references were log cabins and it's difficult todesign a modern house

with reference to log cabins. we looked around, we foundall sorts of references, there are mining towers thatare interesting to look at. the hardest thing to come to grips with is to say when you define on one end, the requirements for a family of five with all of the accoutrementsthat go along with that, you end up with a house thatis probably somewhere between 4500 and 5000 square feet.

log cabins typically are450 to 500 square feet, so there is a difference in scale there that's difficult to reconcile and i felt very stronglythat it was important to find some way to modulatethese differences in scale. the materiality as youwill see is another issue because needless to say, peoplecan build houses of concrete or glass pavilions orany number of things, but it seemed to me thatthere was a particular need

to create something that was recognizable to the eye but yet turned it,turned it in a different way. i like this picture verymuch because in a way, it sort of shows everythingthat got this project started, it's all about doingsomething very vertical. a very vertical mountainin a very vertical building and we were lucky to do thisbuilding that has five stories, a free standing five storylittle house in the mountains, unheard of because code regulations

would usually allow you to build something that has three stories. this is one of the veryfew communities in colorado that has simply no zoning laws. so what we built was a littlesequence tower in the west, and the design is simpleenough, consists out of, we should go back to this. has a steel frame with thefront square of the building being entirely framed in steel and glass.

i was really pleased tofind that the contractor who was an excellent person,managed to find a steel builder who delivered this steelframe all in one piece, all 63 feet of it, only aquarter inch out of plum. so there is a technicalaspect to all of that that is really interestingand was plenty complicated. if you have enough time for it i would tell you the whole story because it was veryexciting to see it go up

to come, to see the flatbedcome down the street and see three guys erect theframe for this little building. it did take two years to build because it's technically very complicated or rather very sophisticated i should say. but what i like about it is that it's a very discrete building and one of the issuesis of course that in, through the seasons,

the seasons are veryvery tough on buildings, it gets very cold and very hot and a lot of the time the people who asked me to buildthis house are not there. so we devised a system of shutters but frankly, i had the idea because i went to paris at some point and i saw that these large19th century buildings have iron shutters in their windows

and so i thought ah,that's an interesting thing because it's an available commodity. so we can probably find steel shutters that they can just ship to colorado. needless to say, thatwasn't exactly the case but, these 10 foot tall shutterswere made of aluminum and they are done in such a way that they can provideventilation on one side but also that they protectthe building completely

when nobody is around, so that it's, that it's completely,that it stands on its own with a blind facade and i'mquite pleased with that. the back of the building is really not the back of the building, it's the south side of the building, faces up mountain, there are lesser views, they are beautiful all the same because they're lookingto the, into the trees.

but again the theme of wanting to shut the building down completely and so there are punched openings and much more restrictive views whereas to the west and to the north, you have these very largeextensive window fill views and this is one of the views. the plan is quite simple andit relies on the fact that when you stack things,

you have to sort of try to make plumbing go on top of other plumbing and, we were very ambitious in trying to make circulation as small as possible so as to keep the footprint really small. i think the building'saltogether 4300 square feet and all circulation happens in that stair. but the stair of course is a little bit more than just a stair,

it also is the spine thatgoes through the building and so it was equallyas important for that to be an agreeable thingto walk up and down and you gather from all of thisthat i'm very interested in on one hand making a sort of clear, creating a clear parti, butone that is physically realized with a real understandingof how we move around space, how we circulate in a planand how we live in a building. so the ground floor is akitchen and a dining area,

there is an entrance and a lobby room and then you go up these stairs. and there is even a little elevator here which is very very slow,but it exists all the same. and the floors above, i don't think we haveall of the floor plans. there is a living room,two children's rooms here, a master bedroom and a central stationoffice library right there.

it's quite nice to see how you can fit these functions over and above and how when you movethrough the building, your views change with thesame focus on the mountains. here you can see the staircase which sort of wraps through the building and becomes a permanentreference to all of the spaces and this is what it looks likein the winter and at night. and shortly afterreceiving this commission,

we were also asked to designa house in colorado in vail, and of a slightly larger footprint for a slightly different kind of family but, you start thinkingabout subjects of one kind and then you carry themonto the next project because you've started to do research and so you explore your own interests in space and technology probably and, listening all the while tothe particular requirements

of a particular client and adapting to thedifferent site conditions. so while it's in colorado,the landscape of vail is very very different fromthe landscape of telluride, it's much less harsh, it's much more, there is much gentler slopes, it's a much more open sky lined there. and so a completely different idea of how you would movearound the plan motivated us

when we designed this house. it was very clear to me that with all these large scale mountains in a far distance, what you needed was a counter point to the big view. so the house is organizedalong the courtyard. if a bedroom tower on the far end. the materials here area little bit different, though again, there is use of stone,

but we were pleased tofind ways of working with black and copper which is simply spectacular as you see it in the course of the day picking up the light in different ways. it's also a very good materialto keep the heat inside and to, you have a copper roof organized, running around this courtyardthat i just mentioned and here is a view of the tower.

one thing that i got verypreoccupied with and again perhaps that talks a littlebit about the context is that as you find ways to put values in different proportions to one another you started to think about materials. in my view, it's always more interesting to come up with the materials after you've come up with the parti, thinking that it's reallymore about structure, space

and proportions. but i was driving on my way to the airport and i saw a little cabinalong the road that had, was entirely constructed of two by sixes and it was absolutely beautiful because you could see thatthere was a structural quality about the stacked lumber. and it was such a simple device to make a heavy enclosure with wood

that it seemed like itwas a masonry enclosure. so i climbed up a little hill, out of the car, up a hill only to see that in fact it was a completely primitive thing and i took photographs on phone and passed them on to the contractor who immediately told us that this was the most impossible thing to do

and nobody could possibly do this well but in the end it prevailed and i was very happy tosee that we could use what's called beetle kill lumber because there is a beetle that's eating all of the trees around there, until you end up with loads of dead wood that is not used for much. and so, it was cut downand stacked in thin bores

and we have about asix inch wood thickness which gives you a particularlybeautiful hard value. sorry. a brand new pond was part of this view and so locating the houseon this pond, on the view, juxtaposing differentspaces to one another, having at once intimacyand interaction with nature are the main topics. let me see the plan.

one of the things that i had to sort of think my way through very carefully was accepting the fact thatif the house was oriented toward the pond right hereand creating a driveway that was going all the wayaround a mountain back here, we ended up with, oops,where is, how does this work. with the garage in there, that gave us a house without a facade. and typically as architectswe think the first thing

has got to be the most important and impressive idea of a house. i was actually rather happy to think that you would never see the house, you would only ever discover it as you were promenading around the site. in other words, this addresses a condition that's entirely anti-urban and relies completelyon the use of the land.

this house is locatedas i mentioned before facing large trees but it also has, it's a large piece of land. so, and not being bound tojust seeing it at that one time when you come into the house, was actually an interesting exploration. here's from the house. by contrast then, completely urban is a project that wecompleted relatively recently

and as randall said earlier, we've done a lot of projectsthat are art related. so, one of the thingsthat i find interesting is to talk to people, to art dealers and to museum directors, to clients in the arts and understand their completelydifferent points of view. i'm showing you a couple of galleries in the course of this lecture

and in many ways i think that they're as different from one another because they are a responseto the different personality, to the different ideasabout how to exhibit art and what the parametersto viewing art can to be. in this particular case, we worked with a client barbara gladstone, who i had done work before. and she called me up one day and said,

it's wonderful, i bought a new site, i'm not sure that wecan keep the building. and this was the building that she bought. it was this home studiothat had only been built, i don't know, 70 years prior. and it had a very large sound space, but it was absolutelyuseless for our purposes and so with a heavy heart, i sort of said, i think we actuallyhave to tear this down.

my heart wasn't thatheavy in all honesty, but, it just seemed like onehas to take responsibility for taking something downthat's completely intact and perfectly workable for something. but in the end we decidedthat that was the only thing that could be done. and so we built a slightlylarger taller exhibition space. it's a gallery that hasone major exhibition space and two smaller gallery spaces

and accommodates a little office. and, the mandate becameincreasingly specific. to begin with, it was, we'regoing to build a building that accommodates very large sculptures. eventually we understood thatit had to include an elevator that was 10 by 10 feet, thatcould carry 50,000 pounds or some such thing, and had to serve all sorts of purposes. what i enjoyed aboutthe project is the idea

that we had an opportunity to do something that was really completely about space and completely about one facade. that one facade had to at once represent something of the gallery and also in our mindsrelate to the neighborhood. the neighborhood of chelsea, i don't know how well you know it, is now lived in by many manycontemporary art galleries,

now beginning to buy shops, there are lots of residential buildings that have recently gone up. but at one time it was an industrial area and so some of that industrial character, unlike say neighborhoods like soho is actually very tough,they're concrete buildings with large structures and so, it felt like the right thing to do

to relate to that neighborhood. it shows brick for the facade and, i guess i went inthe wrong direction. we saw that all the surrounding buildings were brick buildings, we can imagine that in the next few years this is gonna go away and something very verytall was coming here. we're talking about a neighborhood

that's subject to complete change. so you don't know what you're referencing. you can say yes, i amreferencing the neighborhood but what is that neighborhood, maybe it's not gonna be there next year because another condominiumbuilding is gonna go up. it seemed however to us, that finding some kind of grounding, finding some kind of urban space,

something that the humanbody could relate to was of some importance and i think that turned out quite nicely. the brick that we usedhere is very very dense, it's a danish brick froma company called petersen, it's a columbi brick and it was fun to see the mason experiment with it and try out different kindsof raking of the drawings, using different colors grout

and we realized that what we really wanted was something that is very monumental and very very stark, but at the same time has a texture that the person can relate to and i think that worked out well. earlier we did a building on 13th street where some of the sameissues were at work. to begin with, there was a three story

manufacturing building and the developer clienthad acquired a permit to add, i think altogether six stories. and it was meant to bea commercial building, it was meant to be acommercial art building perhaps and, but we weren't very involved for once with the client of the inside but rather served the developer who wanted to make a coherent building.

one of the code requirementswas to have a setback i think 60 feet above ground which makes the street wallin the new zoning code. and so, thinking about what to do, we decided that toothing the brick in and staying in the samekind of facade language for the first new three storieswould be the thing to do. so that was our first experience working with different kinds of brick and,

this is what it looks like now. and what i think was veryimportant about the scheme is that we experimented quite a while with whether the added three stories would in fact be the same material, whether they should beset back artificially, but of course, the developer didn't want to give a square foot away. and in the end i also thought

that the street wall actually made sense. there is a kind of presencethat the building has from the street level that is very nice and when you see the sortof shining black brick, there is a relationship to craft that you don't find very much anymore. but from an, on a larger urban scale, that kind of metal top reads in a very different way fromdifferent points in the city.

occasionally this has beencalled the stealths bomber, i don't know whether that's good or bad. again, the juxtapositioning of sort of an existing vernacular to a completely different language that has larger, larger scale. this building on the upper east side was one of the firstnew town houses we did for the purposes of our art gallery client

who we've done a lot of work with and it's important to mention that what made this project difficult was, that the existing townhouse again, didn't at all fit our requirements to make an interesting gallery space that allowed the owner tobring in large works of art, that allowed the owner tohave large amounts of daylight and accommodated a secondaryprogram on the upper floors.

also, this is an area in new york city that's subject to very verystrict landmarks considerations. so building a completelydifferent kind of building in this existing fabricwas out of the question. instead we experimented withproportions in a hunched, in a hunched facade. taking these rather large french windows and bringing them ina very disciplined way up and down the building,

showing the lower ceilinghow it's screen or windows. windows get smaller as they go up. and, using a, some concrete cement facade rather than a limestone facade. and negotiating that with landmarks and making them appreciatethe subtle differences between a modern building and a not so modernbuilding was quite a feat. in the end, we managedto have a very large

sort of chapel like exhibition space in the, to the very south of the building. filling in an existing courtyard. and these kinds ofprojects are interesting because they make you understand how the city is put together. what interior courtyardsare for, light and air and in this particular case, we took a little bitof light and air away.

and i'm off two minds about it. but we created light andair in this room anyway. let's view some of the interior spaces. now if heard right, i'lltalk a little bit about the neue galerie. and just quickly here isthe story of the building, a sort of french renaissancebrick and limestone building at one time was built or was commissioned by william starr miller.

it says here 1915. sometimes we hear 1914, sometimes 1917. what's remarkable about this building is that it is designedby carrere & hastings and one of the last privatemansions on fifth avenue before the city changed and along fifth avenue you found these very large apartment buildings. it seemed a little bit likea building in the boom box

when people moved into itat that particular time, it was far north, therewas not very much going on, st. phil park was not asfancy as it is nowadays but it is a private building. later, i think in the early 50s, it was taken up by the yivo institute and was, became the homefor all the documents of the nuremberg trial, quite an interesting piece of history

and many people went thereand studied these documents. so this building had aparticular kind of aura about it and by the time that we were commissioned with this renovation, theonly thing that we knew was that we had to fit in a new elevator, we had to fit in a museumtype climate control. but nobody knew exactly whatthis museum was going to be, we knew that it was going to be dedicated to german and austrian art

and, german and austrian artup to 1945 was the mandate. so it was about that periodin germany and austria, time of the century, up through the war. but it's the early modernistor the modernist times, and so the juxtaposition ofthis traditional building to a modern time isactually very interesting and you can see here theold carrere & hastings plans much to our surprise, thiswonderful monumental staircase which makes the centerof the building now,

wasn't there at that time. also, i was amused to see that when we were commissionedwith this building, there had been anotherarchitect previously commissioned with the same job, who had produced a little bit of work. anyway the demo drawingswhich read very clearly, demolish monumental stair, so i think we got thisjob in a nick of time

and saved that from happening. we can scroll, just run through the plans. there is a wonderful glassroof that serves as a courtyard to the office and brings daylight all the way down to the ground floor and a lot of the old patterning remain and this is one of the projects, where i'm showing here a picture of this successionist building

in 1897, only to say therewere these two things going on at the same time. there was on one hand the renovation, restoration of the building, and on the other hand, relating to the mandate of the building showing art and architecture and design of the early 20th century. and the reference always would be

the venerech desler, otogado et cetera. i'm sure you're allvery familiar with that. so here are some pictures of the building before the restoration andrenovation, restoration, is a very interesting subject onto itself because it always addressesthat which is old, that has to be repaired and has to be repaired in such a way that it comes across as believable,authentic and solid.

that part of a renovation that logically really makes part of the old fabric, and that part of the renovation where you have to distinguish yourself by saying here is anotherarchitect who did something. in this particular case,the thing that really was very clearly notpart of the old fabric, is obviously all of the lighting where we sort of referenced a little bit,

the vienna school if you will. and the elevator whichgoes through the building and it was very clearly notpart of the existing fabric. so, when you do this kindof work, i always think you have to deal with itwith surgical attention. it's a very different partof the ground it occupies, that you occupy, becauseit's not about making space, it's about making senseof the existing fabric and once again the word contextcomes up quite naturally.

on the hills of the neue galerie, we are asked to renovatea very similar building, institute for the studyof the ancient world. a few blocks down from the neue galerie. another limestone mansion that at one time had been a private building and later served another institution. and now as part of new york university and is a phd (mumbles)

place for scholars to read about, read and study about the ancient world. the patron who commissionedthe work, our work, was, is a person who's veryinterested in archeology and has a wonderful collection of archeological finds all over the world. he was very interested injuxtaposing old and new. when we started to thinkthat the renovation was really just about makinghandicapped requirements work,

making it possible to bringlarge works of art in, making existing spaces such asthis oval staircase perfect, renovating or restoring ratherthese large exhibition halls and in the end, whatwas really interesting was the opportunity to makea three story modern library in the back half of the building and that was one of those things, that there was a librarythat was part of the program and as we were working onthe plans, i had this thought

that it had to be completely different from every other part of the building and it was an opportunity to make a significantstructural intervention and we inserted a fourstory steel skeleton in this three story volume of the building and thereby achieved room for more books but that was really more anargument than anything else. essentially it was reallyabout the idea of taking,

taking an element that creates sort of a communal sense of studying in a different kind of space,relative to the old world. finally, i'm not surethat this is finally but, anyway, coming up to the end. abercrombie & fitch has beenour client for some time now and we are in charge ofdesigning their flagship stores. this is the first one,the new york city one and we like to say that we're pleased

mostly about the fact that, we were able to return thebuilding back to the city because in recent years ithad been another fashion store that had created a terribleinnovation on the underground, by just cluttering theground with travertine and when we werecommissioned with this job, we found old photographs and said ahn ahn, there was a harbor dasherin this location before, why not use that as an orientation.

and not all too slavishly, here you'll see what it looked like, not all too slavishly recreated. this steel and glass volume. and it's a little bit unusual because unlike a lot ofretail establishments, this is one where youcan't look into the store and there is a sense of curiosity that is inspired hopefully

as with the lighting and these movers. often times people sayit's like a club inside and i don't like that partof the conversation so much because yes it's dark and yes it's loud and yes there are half nakedpeople standing around it but i think the architecturalspace is very nice and when you take the time to look, you will see that the detailing is very very beautifullydone and very carefully done.

and even if you don't look,i think you will feel it and it seems that we've done, we've had a pretty successful run of it. it was fun to design thesevery tricky portrayings and now we're completingone of the stores in tokyo, making a store that's 11 stories tall on a very very small footprint and i'm quite excited about it, not only because it's a new building

and we're doing something in tokyo, but also because it's anunusual store concept, have you ever seen a store for one and the same kind of thing, for 11 stores, it'sreally just all staircase and it's pretty exciting. i also think it looks very beautiful and is commensurate with all these otherbuildings surrounding it,

has a very elegant steel and glass facade, similar in detail to the onethat we established in new york but in a way articulated differently over the tall volume. here you can see that the front half, actually a little bit more than the front half of the building is all dedicated to circulation. so there's very little shopping going on

and a lot of other things,whatever they may be. there is a language that wasestablished with the client for these flagship storesand i'm often asked, is this one also dark,is this one also loud and really there's only one thing you can say and that's yes. i however think thatwhat's really interesting about doing thesedifferent flagship stores is there a totally differenttopologies of buildings.

in the one we just dida shop in a building that was designed by gio ponti originally and so the spatial configuration is completely different and the client is interesting enough to allow us to explore thatand to make a very clear plan and all the decor aside, i think they actually are verygood architectural spaces. finally, 200 11th avenue isthe building that randall

briefly talked about, it's located in chelsea,it's dominated beautifully by this dark late highbuilding and the high line. this is what the neighborhoodlooked like at one time and as i mentioned earlier when i showed you one ofour gladstone galleries, the center of it is subjectto such dramatic change. it's really quite unusual because there is an enormousamount of building going on

with all these new residentialtowers by jean nouvel, by frank gehry, by shigeru ban and we figure and the marks them. and we were asked to design a building, again on a very small footprint on the corner of 24th and 11th avenue and the thing that wasinteresting about this site was the fact that you could really only do these one apartmentper floor buildings,

it's 19 stories tall,there are 16 apartments, 14 of them are duplex apartments and they are sort of ina yin yang configuration and eventually werealized, there was no way that we could have parking on that site but it was deemed a necessaryluxury item if you will. so after much debate andalmost jokingly we said well, why not just make an elevator for the cars and that idea stuck.

we couldn't go down into the ground because the water table is very high, it would have been extremely costly to do a sort of bathtubtype parking garage. quite frankly we didn'treally have enough room either to accommodate turningradiuses in the building so the elevator conceptreally made a lot of sense but it was very difficultto get this through planning and through community boards et cetera

because people were terribly worried that this was a dangerous thing to do. in the end, we managed to prove that it's really relatively straightforward, that it's not very difficultto do but in the end it is very very expensive to do and it really only suits a purpose of one such small footprint building because there's only storagefor one car per floor.

so it's something that ithink is a fairly unique thing but people got very excited about it when in fact the thingthat we found exciting was the opportunity that16 apartments in a building that is 250 feet tall wouldallow us to design apartments that have exceptionallyhigh ceiling heights. so some of the apartments have a standard ceiling height of 11 feet but some other spaces areas much as 23 feet tall.

now that's a difficult thing to do because a 23 foot high space easily lacks intimacy, easilydoesn't feel residential and i think we managed to do something that really straddles both requirements. there are issues of transparency, our competitors for the same site had designed all glass buildings and the discourse within theoffice between sara and myself

had been very much that we didn't want to see another building that didn't relate to the street, that didn't relate topeople actually walking, however how blunderous that might sound. so what we did is we designed a facade. again perspecting the 60 foot street wall. the lower portion of the building being clad with terra cotta

that lends itself to beingshaped and having sort of color and a tactile interest. and the upper part of thebuilding having a squim or squimming type device which is made in stainless steel. there was a desire to do something that's not completely straightforward so we explored making shapes and playing around with theopportunity to shape material

and both of these, the terra cotta as wellas the stainless steel obviously lend themselves to that in ways that become very appealing. at the same time there is agreat deal of transparency that the building affords through that, the windows are in factfloor to ceiling glass but we introduced a secondlayer of mantent glass so as to give you

a little bit of protectionfrom the inside. here you can see how this works,you drive in from one side, you drop somebody off if you want to then you drive into the elevator and as you get to your floor you pull back, you park your car and you find your way to your apartment. it's a tall building, as youcan see, it's a spinning one and so just making this structurework was very significant

and caused us a lot of problems because the concrete endedup being so much bigger than anybody ever wanted it to be, eating up a lot of space. but here is a section thatshows the relationship between the river and the car. renderings of the spaces, opportunities to use your two story tall spaces, and this is what the space looks like

now that it's still under construction but they're pretty marvelous spaces and i'm very excited to see it being done. i will come into theend of this little talk and i will end with a fewimages of mies van der rohe also in 1923, at a time when the worldwas changing so much, i don't know whether it'schanging quite as much right now, but some of the same thoughtsi think, pre-occupy us

and they have to do withhow do we build today, what does, how do we makearchitecture meaningful, among other things, i think that mies, made a very interesting statement and that is that what you see is so much less of whatarchitecture is all about and that's what i think too. thank you. - [randall] we have afew minutes of questions

if you have a questionplease raise your hand. - [man] i'll ask a question actually. your work is, we talk about context and especially the building's space. your buildings act as frames for context as much as the contextframes the buildings and i'm wondering, i findmyself wanting more views from the insides of your buildings. could you talk about howyou might frame landscape

or frame elements of the urban fabric as well as allowing the urban fabric or the kind of rural landscape to frame the buildings themselves. - it's interesting that youask that because i think it, it talks a little, this has todo a little bit with process. as a young architect, thefirst project i ever did was a kitchen. the next project i did wasa kitchen and a bathroom,

the project after that was a kitchen, a bathroom and a living room. and that went on for a long while and, what it fostered wasthinking about interior space a long time before you werethinking about exterior space and creating volumes. and so in some ways ithink it's correct to say that the way we conceive of buildings is very much from the inside out,

it has very much to dowith where do you arrive and what do you do when you do arrive and how you move around the building and practically all of my initialconcept sketches are plans rather than elevations or sections or three dimensional drawings, but they always have todo with what do you feel, what do you see and what do you get. that's hard to show,

unless you wanna be here until tomorrow. we have plenty of interiorphotographs of the work, but of course i'm a little bit interested like all of us architectsare to see what happens when you take that outside and how can you make a plausible pull from the inside to the outside and maintain structural integrity and live up to all of the big goals

that make up an architectural space and so yes, i think, i don't know whether this answers your question but um, but it starts all with the function, it all starts withcirculation in interior space and the vision about how big, how wide, where does the light come from, how do you experience light,how this space makes you feel. when i say i don't think about materials,

i think i can honestlysay that that is true but in an intuitive way, of course you absorb all of that already and you bring that intoyour conceptualizing. - [man] in the first projectthat you showed us that, you dealt with a projectthat had to be carried across a pretty dense terrain. - [man] how do you look at that aspect of having to design aproject to be transported

to be built as a positive aspect of design to open up opportunitiesrather than a limitation. - to begin with, i think youtry to look at everything as a positive opportunityrather than as a limitation because if you thinkof it as a limitation, it's very difficult to move forward. rather than thinking of it though, in any particular way,positive or negative, i think, you think of it as a condition

and creating conditions for the work is part of our process i think, we're very respectfulof a client's program, we're very respectfulof a client's budget. we're really interested torelating our architecture to a particular locationrather than saying, it's a universal general thing and in a way that is why ishowed the corbusier house is because there is differentways of thinking about it,

i'm not the one to saythat it's right or wrong, but for us being specific and precise to the set of conditionsthat we find ourselves in is very important and becomes a tool tosort of generate ideas. - [randall] annabelle i'm, i'm very much interested in this problem, this issue of the comping and scaling. many of your projects arerelatively small scale

including the museum projects. the last one you showed and some others that i know that you've done represent an order of magnitude that is pretty significant jump, what were the challengesthat you and sara faced when you took on a projectlike the condominium that you just showed us in terms of moving from that more intimatescale of a gallery,

of a abercrombie & fitch, ofthe houses that you build, to the scale of a 20 story taller. - in a funny way i don'tthink that was a problem and that may be to ourdetriment because we do that the same way that we do everything else. you sort of have to makea problem manageable, you have to bring it to thesize in which you can handle it. and i think that that's oneof the big problems we have in architecture today, isthat those very large projects

that we se all around are so much driven by a lack of understanding of how small it has to get inorder to be comprehensible. what i mean by that is that we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to fit the pieces together and making sense of the whole, but the problem is not so muchcould we manage the scale. i think the problem is, howcomplicated it is to fit that

in a larger budget, in a larger time frame and to, i think the 20011 is actually successful on exactly that, it isincredibly, precisely designed, the floor plans are really verybeautiful if i say so myself but to get, have that kindof precision translated in a large building site, thatis where it gets difficult. i think it's costly for one, is a good floor plan costly, not really. but getting a buildingbuilt with precision

and with the kind of attentionto detail that we are used to from our smaller projects,that's very hard to do. and to understand howto manage the process, how to handle 20 consultantsrather than four, that's complicated. - [man] okay you can talkwith annabelle in person at her book signing whereshe'll be signing copies of selldorf architect'smonograph, thank you very much. - [man] it's so nice to see the work.

- [annabelle] thank you, thank you.

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