ONSTAGE: INTERVIEW WITH JING LIU, SO-IL

“The world we live in is a pool of knowledge that we draw from.”, —Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg, SO-IL

The couple, Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg, with their firm SO-IL, I spoke extensively about in the previous article, represents one of the most interesting and original names among the young generation of architects. They don’t like, as some have pointed out, to be identified with any prefixed category or be limited to any precise place: the multicultural background that has shaped their personalities doesn’t fit any stereotypical classification. Accustomed to a constant evolution, they have always been able to grasp the best from every situation. They know these difficult transient experiences and perhaps, for this reason, have conceived Transhistoria, one of their installations in a very special neighborhood of New York, Jackson Heights, in Queens, where more than 170 languages are spoken, a site lived by people as a moment and place of transition. In this area, one of the most heterogeneous and densely populated of the city, the stories that alternate are varied, speaking of migration, of a search for a new home after having lost one, or simply of the need for a temporary accommodation. Poets, writers, rappers and even a chaplain gave, in the course of a week, a voice to various individual vicissitudes in indoor or outdoor spaces, the room of an apartment, the recess of a theater or a secluded spot in a church, a courtyard or a bench. The aim was to create, through these narratives, a true emotional interaction between visitors and the location where roots had to adapt for a short while, waiting for a new replant.

上下文对两者都有不可估量的价值，并充满激情参与了对其可以提供的多种内容的丰富性的探索。"We believe beauty can emerge from the collision of cultures",他们指出，正是由于这种全心全意的信念，他们的建议是通过多次合作和学科的交叉授粉而发展的。只有聆听不同的声音才能想像一个更开放，进步和包容的世界。与人交#raybet官网谈的社会中生活的建筑必须引起经验，并且必须以最广泛和不同文化背景的人们的最多方式看待。他们的工作室总部位于纽约，但他们喜欢指定确切的位置布鲁克林，以强调特定角色的本质，该角色渗透到城市的这一部分，在其他地区找不到。


Beeline Installation at the MAAT, Lisbon, Portugal. SO-IL. Photo Iwan Baan/ Courtesy of SO-IL.

The events that will lead them to eventually set up SO-IL unfold through two very distant paths with various opportunities to meet and reconnect. Jing Liu, born in China, raised in Japan and the UK, graduates from the Tulane School of Architecture in New Orleans, Florian Idenburg, of Dutch descent, without hesitation immediately begins to practice at SANAA, where he remains for more than eight years. Jing, after many uncertainties about which career to follow, lover of languages, a true polyglot, attracted also to writing, spends a period as an intern at SANAA, then moves to New York, deciding to work for Kohn Pedersen Fox. Florian, as chief architect, oversees important projects of Sejima, as the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which takes him often to New York, where they have the occasion to rencounter and decide to live together. It is difficult to imagine them separate, a couple with very different and distinctive characters, but truly able to complement one another.

In 2008 they opened their own studio, a journey that will not be easy due to the recession, but, as Florian explains, even if "工作室的脆弱性给出了一定的关注", the situation will represent a moment for reflection that will allow them to ponder on their own narrative and to engage in smaller projects embracing a broad range of social problems. The experience from an embryonic stage evolved until finding a clear voice. As suggests the name that identifies the firm, SO-IL, 'Solid Objectives- Idenburg Liu', alluding to the ideas that enact their aspirations but also have to be materialized, was born an architecture, marked by a subjective interpretation of universal themes and expressed with an extremely original and experimental language. In 2010, winning the Young Architects Program competition for the MoMa P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, in Queens, with their site-specific installation钢管舞, Jing and Florian saw their hard, tenacious commitment gain an international recognition. The metaphoric perfection of an unstable system, helped by the interactive and enthusiastic support of the audience, alluding to the precarious situation of economic crisis of the society in those years, earns them this comment by Bergdoll:“我认为该项目有点像他们的个性。它们显得谦虚且非常简单。要花一些时间才能意识到他们已经有了这种有点颠覆性的暗流”。Installations will become a recurring appointment in the course of their creations, a genre that is particularly congenial in conveying their ideals: an open-end and extremely participatory architecture, able to communicate strong messages of awareness and receive multitude of different responses. Their original creativity, expressed with the most varied collaborations from art, dance, music, literature, draws from an exquisitely refined and extraordinarily imaginative aesthetic alphabet. Their dynamic, intense and unexpected approach likes, as Florian says, “to agitate the audience” and “rub up to the public sphere”: a strong empathy captures people into a vertigo of playful interactivity.


拉斯美洲社会住房，Leon, Mexico 2016. SO-IL. Photo Iwan Baan /Courtesy of SO-IL.

We can notice several of these characteristics also within their architectural works, which are conceived with generosity but never lose sight of rationality, achieving results difficult to imagine with the most modest means. There is a desire, common to all the projects, to create pleasant spaces that can be loved by their users. Particularly interesting in this regard, is a recently completed social-housing in the city of León, Mexico, where the high costs of urban center has pushed to a sort of depopulation in favour of monotonous standardized residential units of one or two floors in the most remote peripheral areas, often lacking in public services or infrastructure. Las Americas, a 6-storey vertical condominium, with 60 units, proposed as an alternative against the uncontrolled development of a banal suburban urbanization, aims, as a true prototype, to launch vertical dwellings and limit the loss of a critical density in an increasingly desolate city. The complex, while maximizing the plot of land, an essential prerequisite of the economic assumption, provides two large internal courtyards, and is arranged in a way that the units don’t face one another, everyone with the view of the courtyard and neighborhood: a strategic idea to evoke and offer a sense of traditional home’s privacy and intimacy to a population that shows to prefer independent single-family residences to a vertical typology. The importance of a multigenerational presence of support has not been forgotten in designing the layout of the apartments.

What could have been a deterrent, the limited budget to be respected, reaches a simple but also captivating formal expression. A special concrete brick is designed in collaboration with local fabricators, economical and easy to install. And the final result, created from the alternating arrangement of the bricks gives the facade an important porosity and rhythmic fluidity, a decidedly interesting, intriguing skin. There are several projects, dating back to a few years, that explore the problem of micro-housing, seeking a response in the collective interest of inhabitants, avoiding the endless repetitive uniformity often connected with affordability: tiNY, a desirable model of sustainability for the 27th Street in Manhattan, New York and, just to mention another, Jay Street, for the client Tankhouse, in Brooklyn, which embodies new efficient ways to live in the city, in spaces that present attractive qualities other than size.

拉斯美洲社会住房，Leon, Mexico 2016. SO-IL. Photo Iwan Baan /Courtesy of SO-IL.

Recently, following the volume, 'Solid Objectives: Order, Edge, Aura', a sort of manifesto dedicated to the principles that nourish the architecture of SO-IL, has been published their first new monograph 'SO-IL- Unfinished Business ', in the A + U edition, a compendium of their realized and schematic works, accompanied by photographs of Iwan Baan. The title alludes to the meaning they attribute to architecture: a presence that can evolve over time, open-ended, catalyst for occasions of human interaction, participation and exchange, full of future, new implications.

1—Working as a couple, and I mean as husband and wife, can be a really rewarding relation but also very difficult. How would you describe your relationship in professional terms?

正如您所说，在我们的情况下，在我们的情况下，一个男人和一个女人，在许多关系中可能具有挑战性，在许多关系中，两个或更多人的观察方式和与世界的互动以及世界如何看待他们是完全不同的。弗洛里安（Florian）和我都有各种各样的环境，我们可以从中借鉴，并有一个好奇心和愿意受到他人的挑战和改变的意愿，因此我认为这就是为什么它运作到远处的原因，并非没有日常的谈判，有时甚至是痛苦和挫败感。但是，这样的谈判也产生了一种更开放和开放的建筑。#raybet官网它使我们能够探索未预先确定的正式方法和更细微的审美语言。

2—You have realized works that have provoked great participation and interaction with the public: the formal aspect is always extremely fascinating and able to sweeten alarming messages with imaginative allegories. Do you believe that the public, apart from an audience, intellectually more elitist, is concerned with decoding the message that the installation underlies, not remaining literally captivated by the imaginative creativity of the performance?

我们希望我们的体系结构是多价的#raybet官网，因此不同观众的收到和经历。的确，我们对与社会和整个环境的关系中的人类状况非常认真，他们是紧迫而令人不安的问题。同时，我们还将建筑视为理性和艺术的实践，含义，我们可以与建筑#raybet官网相当普遍和情感的事物进行交谈。我确实相信，建筑空间可以慷慨和嬉戏，其物质实践被认为和敏感，这些都是可以为参与建立它的人和用户带来更大的喜悦和同情的品质。我们要注意确保通过形式和构造学有意识或潜意识地体验我们的体系结构，因此不需#raybet官网要文化参考的先决条件。这是我们的同伴从业者扩大我们自己的思维范围和创建工具的范围。



Murmuration Installation, Atlanta, Georgia 2020. SO-IL . Photo of Fredrik Brauer/ courtesy of SO-IL

3— I believe that aesthetics play a prominent role in your idea of architecture. The details, in the most meticulous finishes, as a formal and conceptual compendium, are a powerful feature that accompanies all your realizations and that makes them so different from others. Is it perhaps the collaborative synergy of the couple’s female and male part that helps the unique multifaceted richness of these small refinements?

By virtue of having two strong minded and very different creative demand in the design process, the result must satisfy a broader range of desires. So I guess that makes us ask more questions and spend more times in finding the answers to them. I’m not sure if the female-male combination makes much of a difference or if you could make a general judgement if the female taste is broadly one and the male another. In fact, in most case, Florian’s aesthetic preferences lean towards those choices more conventionally considered feminine and mine more masculine. Nevertheless, as designers we tend to focus on different scales, and problem solve with different approaches. I do see that this difference allows us to tackle complex questions with greater precision and indeed, arriving at a richer outcome than if only one of us is holding the pen.

4-有一个充满diaphanous坦率的光环，它复发并包裹着您的许多项目，这种语言以极大的精致和诗歌对我们说话。raybet官网正式的选择是否应对特定需求，可能与永久进化中建筑的想法有关？#raybet官网

Yes, there is definitely a desire to not pretend that architecture is a timeless unchanged entity. It would be a lifeless thing to pursue. We do appreciate that some ideas and practices are to endure and understand architecture as a vessel for them in many instances. However, that’s not all. There are also aspects of architecture that are more dynamic, hard to grasp or even fleeting. We hope that we can make architecture that is both enduring and full of life.



Into The Hedge, Columbus, Indiana 2019. SO-IL. Photo of Hadley Fruits for Exhibit Columbus/ courtesy of SO-IL.

5-里斯本马特建筑和技术博物馆最#raybet官网近献给您展览“ Currents-临时建筑”，这是您12个壮观的装置的集合，不仅是每个人的真正愉悦，而且是一个庆祝作品的庆祝活动它比另一个更美丽，更有意义。我相信，对于您来说，也应该是一个巨大的满足感，看到了如此多的努力和创造力。在各种项目中，是否有一个给您特别满足的项目？raybet官网

That’s a difficult question. In each of these installations, we are exploring in a very focused way one or two themes that are recurring in our works. These are layered spaces, elastic forms, unstable yet resilient structures, hybridity of the digital and physical, mutability of history etc. Sometimes, we are also exploring new themes of course. They are not precursors to ‘real’ architecture, they are essential building blocks of more complex projects. Some of these explorations are easier to find their place in the current building practice and other more difficult either because of planning regulations or industry or technological limitations. For example, the layering of spaces and a more nuanced relationship to history are often instrumentalized in our buildings, but elastic form and unstable structures are harder to push the boundaries for. We keep trying and believe that through incremental effort, we will pivot the practice towards a more intelligent and less rigid way of thinking. So the projects that seem the most poetic and less realistic might yield to the most return in the long run.
6—You have always tried, whenever possible, to preserve in the architectural manufacturing the most significant characteristics of an artisan tradition that would be really important that does not disappear. Every time you have been able to combine the beauty of its special tactile and sensory qualities with the perfection of the computerized calculation, that ensures many advantages from the point of view of the practical realization. Given your experience and considering the international productive construction panorama, do you think there is still a future for high-level manual skills?

Yes certainly. Indeed, the industry is evolving towards a more standardized and efficient way of production, as it always has, there was always room for crafts. The important thing is, what effects do these crafts produce? I think we have to be very intentional with them. Crafts are different from manual labor. Crafts invite the craftsman as part of the collaboration, so it also requires us to be more generous and flexible to give room for variance and other inputs. It requires a more intelligent process. Again, it is about collaboration, not just between the two of us, or with our peer consultants, but also with people who work with their hands. It brings out an architecture that is more open we believe.
7—For years now, you have been highlighting and trying to raise awareness of the responsibility that everyone has towards a precarious 'sustainable' balance at risk of collapse, which in recent times has given signs of a worrying aggravation. As architects, what should be done that has not yet been done?

So many! I think first of all we should expand on what architecture is and can be. This is not a new concept. In the past few decades, we have been “addicted” sort to say to building and developing for the sake of it. There is much room in preservation, renovation, reuse and maintenance that could be part of the architecture discourse. Beyond that, when new buildings and new developments are deemed necessary, there is much to expand in terms of construction norms. Many of the technologies and science exist to build more consciously and thoughtfully, we need to put more pressure collectively on clients, cities and industries to commit to doing things differently. We can do better!


Virginia Cucchi

Credits:

so-il：http：//www.so-il.org/

拉斯美洲社会住房，
Leon, Mexico 2016
Team: Florian Idenburg, Ilias Papageorgiou, Isabel Sarasa, Seunghyun Kang, Sophie Nichols, Pam Anantrungroj
Collaborators: Imuvi: Amador Rodriguez, Ruben Alejandro Vazquez Rivera
Photo Iwan Baan/ courtesy of SO-IL

Into The Hedge,
哥伦布，印第安纳州2019
Team: Jing Liu, Sophie Nichols, Francesca Maffeis
Photos Hadley Fruits for Exhibit Columbus/ courtesy of SO-IL

Murmuration Installation
Atlanta, Georgia 2020
Team: Florian Idenburg, Ted Baab, Andrew Gibbs, Ray Rui Wu
Photos Fredrik Brauer/ courtesy of SO-IL

Beeline, MAAT Installation
Lisbon, Portugal
团队：Florian Idenburg，Martina Baratta，Yuanjun Summer Liu
Photos Iwan Baan/ courtesy of SO-IL