School's Out! #44 with Florian Idenburg

School's Out! #44

For our School’s Out! on Friday 20 September, we invited internationally renowned architect Florian Idenburg, co-founder of SO – IL. The architecture office was founded in 2008 in New-York together with Jing Liu. His lecture "Cancel the Corridor, amongst others" presented recent work and in-process work of SO – IL.

Florian Idenburg is an internationally renowned architect with over two decades of professional experience. After learning the ropes in Amsterdam and Tokyo, he founded SO – IL in New York together with Jing Liu in 2008. His years of working in cross-cultural settings make Florian a thoughtful and collaborative partner. With a joyous demeanor, he pursues innovation through working together. He has a particularly strong background in institutional spaces, leading the office on projects such as Kukje Gallery and the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis as well as Amant in Brooklyn. His strength lies in generating imaginative ideas and transforming those into real-world spaces and objects.

Idenburg has a strong intuition for the orchestration of form, material, and light, and enjoys developing projects to a level where those elements become places for people to experience and use. He combines a hands-on approach with a theoretical drive, sharing this creative spirit with clients, collaborators, and students. Recently, Taschen published six years of Florian's research on workspaces in The Office of Good Intentions: Human(s) Work. A frequent speaker at institutions around the world, he has taught at Harvard, MIT, Columbia, and Princeton University and is currently Professor of the Practice at Cornell University. In 2010, Idenburg received the Charlotte Köhler Award of the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund. He is a registered architect in the Netherlands and an International Associate of the American Institute of Architects.

About SO – IL

SO – IL was born in New York in 2008. Diverse in origin, their team of collaborators speaks a dozen languages and is informed by global narratives and perspectives. They are both locally-rooted and nationless, coming together as a mid-size, well-recognized company. With their ambitious private and public clients, they explore how the creation of environments and objects inspires lasting positive intellectual and societal engagement. They have completed projects in Leon, Seoul, and Lisbon, as well as their hometown, Brooklyn, New York.

In a digitized world that increasingly draws one inward, their architecture is outward-looking, engendering meaningful dialogue with what is materially and psychologically outside of ourselves. Their concept home for nomadic living in Milan encourages an active awareness of life beyond routine. At the University of California, Davis campus, they designed a museum that cultivates an intentionally open-ended relationship between the visitor and the site at the outset. They design with time in mind. Whether working with existing structures or building from the ground, they carefully investigate physical properties and history. In Meisenthal, France, they transformed an industrial heritage site into a thriving cultural campus in this way. They interventions are both respectful of their pasts and adaptable to a dynamic future. They have been featured in the New York Times, CNN, and Frankfurter Allgemeine. Their work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Their team has received numerous accolades, including the Vilcek Award, the Curbed Groundbreakers Award, and the MoMAPS1 Young Architects Program Award. Their New York practice is led by Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg.

Programme

18:30 Doors open, drinks bites and tunes

19:00 - 20:15 Presentation by Florian Idenburg + Q&A

20:30 - 22:00 Drinks, bites and tunes

Williams College Museum of Art, SO - IL Williamstown, MA, USA

CubeHouse, SO - IL
Zuidas, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2023