LB 17 SO – IL amant ONLINE sample PREVIEW

SO – IL

AMANT

SO – IL Born in 2008, SO – IL is an internationallyrecognized architecture and design firm based in New York.

Diverse in origin, our team of collaborators speak a dozen languages and is informed by global narratives and perspectives. With ambitious private and public clients, SO – IL explores how the creation of environments and objects inspires lasting positive intellectual and societal engagement. We find this work especially meaningful amidst the current social climate, as the arts have historically facilitated complex cultural conversations. Questions concerning access, openness, inclusivity, education, and sustainability resonate through art and manifest as tangible, physical frameworks for the architecture we create to house it.

In a digitized world that increasingly draws one inward, our architecture is outward-looking, engendering meaningful dialogue with what is materially and psychologically outside of ourselves.

LONTI EBERS Lonti Ebers is a long-time art collector and supporter of contemporary art. She established Amant to create studios and exhibition spaces that would encourage artistic development and experimentation free of the financial burden and administrative confines that typically accompany art practice in New York. Lonti has served on the boards of several museums in both the US and abroad and is currently a trustee of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where she chairs the committee of Media and Performance.

JOB FLORIS Job Floris is an architect and the co-founder of MONADNOCK, a Rotterdam-based office for architecture, urbanism, interiors, and research. He trained as an interior and furniture designer at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and as an architect at the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture. Floris writes about architecture for various media and is a visiting lecturer at various architecture institutes. He is currently at the EPFL in Lausanne.

MARTINO STIERLI Martino Stierli is the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he oversees the wide-ranging program of special exhibitions, installations, and acquisitions of the Department of Architecture and Design. Stierli has taught at Princeton and Columbia University, the universities of Zurich and Basel, EPF Lausanne, and ETH Zurich, from where he holds a PhD.

LB 17 SO – IL amant, is the seventeenth title of AMAG LONG BOOKS COLLECTION.

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THE BEGINNING In the spring of 2014, I contacted the architect Florian Idenburg to discuss the possibility of his firm, SO – IL, designing a building project that would include an exhibition and performance space, as well as space for an artists’ studio residency. The underlying concept was to focus on the creative community, which was becoming increasingly sidelined due to the city’s prohibitive real estate costs. It was our hope, as a nonprofit institution, that we could provide a welcoming and encouraging venue for creative producers while at the same time accessing new audiences by offering a new kind of art space in a neighborhood that was not well-served by institutions and by bringing New York’s dedicated museum-goers to East Williamsburg by showing the kind of art that isn’t shown anywhere else in the city.

I’m proud to say that the result reflected my vision. Our exhibiting artists stage shows that regularly include film, dance, paintings, sculpture and even text. The space was designed to meet their needs, whatever those may be.

Our studio residents have workspaces and a communal area with a nice long table for the sharing of meals and ideas. When Amant first opened many journalists asked why I didn’t just build a space to show my collection, but that thought never occurred to me as I saw more pressing needs.

There is other work being made around the world that is research-based, interdisciplinary and in perfect conversation with our current moment.

Yet it might not fit into the tidy categories more typically shown at existing institutions. Amant hopes to fill a void, presenting exhibitions and performances alongside studio residencies for creative growth in New York. While there had originally been only one site available to situate these functions, the genesis of the project led us to inhabit multiple sites, thereby allowing for buildings with discrete functions to be interwoven with pleasurable green social spaces.

LONTI EBERS

It was SO – IL’s vision to exploit these features and employ the visual language of the neighborhood, which allows us to reside so harmoniously in this industrial section of Brooklyn.

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NOT-SO-DIRTY REALISM Amant, a non-profit arts organization that was founded in the East Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn in 2019, is among the most ambitious new cultural institutions in New York City. Its campus, spread across two city blocks and made up of four individual buildings and a suite of public spaces and courtyards, is equally one of the finest pieces of contemporary architecture to be realized in New York in recent years. SO – IL’s design is remarkable for several reasons, at least two of which deserve closer examination. Amant boasts, first of all, a thoughtful distribution of individual volumes on both sides of Maujer Street grouped around several interior courtyards and green spaces beautifully designed

by Future Green. This arrangement allows this fledgling institution, comprised of contemporary exhibition and public programming spaces, artist studios, offices, and a café, to weave itself into the fabric of the city. Secondly, the architecture of the campus features several unusual material choices for a cultural institution. These choices–specifically brick, concrete, and metal–are informed by the grittiness of the urban context and its industrial character, but at the same time are presented in a highly conscious fashion and are carefully assembled to elevate and ennoble the ordinariness of these materials. In terms of both urbanism and materiality, architects Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu, together with their team, propose an approach to urban architecture and the cultural infrastructure of their city that is cognizant of historical precedent and, at the same time, suggestive of a model that may be emulated elsewhere in the future.

The spatial organization of Amant into a campus made up of several smaller buildings spread across two city blocks interspersed with a variety of public spaces speaks to the deeply urbanistic thinking at play. Typologically speaking, cultural institutions have historically tended to showcase themselves in large, monolithic buildings representing civic pride whose appearance both elevated and monumentalized the program and institutional mission. Another reference could have been the large number of private art institutions housed in the former residences or studios of artists, lending them a decidedly personal and domestic feeling. SO – IL’s Amant is something remarkably different that is inviting and generous to the public: a complex that is not only the home for art and artists but one that also signals its openness and accessibility to visitors and passersby; a campus that is porous and permeable to the surrounding neighborhood. Besides the publically accessible gardens, this quality is accomplished primarily through Maujer Street, which bifurcates the Amant campus into two halves, and by the fact that entry is free to everyone. As such, Amant is a gesture and an offer not only to the art world but also to its immediate urban context. Rather than merely another ostentatious display of an impressive art collection (and in fact, the collection of Amant’s founder, Lonti Ebers, is not even part of the Amant equation), it is a space of artistic experimentation and social engagement, an organization that has the potential to transform its industrial and post-industrial setting by directly engaging with it.

The concept of the cultural institution as a campus is not entirely new, but it is here applied in the sense of urban repair. If other similar projects have tended to gentrify their neighborhoods by proposing to radically transform them and, as a consequence, displace longterm residents, Amant’s architectural design suggests instead a sensitive intervention that enhances rather than replaces the character of the existing urban context. A prominent historical precedent for the idea of the cultural campus is William L. Pereira’s 1965 design for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which consisted of three separate pavilions grouped around a raised plaza with water fountains and embedded into a park that included the La Brea Tar Pits (Pereira’s buildings were recently razed to make space for the new Peter Zumthor-designed LACMA). But while the breaking up of the museum into a set of pavil-

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THE BETRAY OF THE EVERYDAY While observing Amant, a quote immediately comes to mind. One of Rem Koolhaas in an encounter with Toyo Ito, praising the work of the Japanese master as ‘Lite.’ As in lite-beer or other consumer goods, lite is better, healthier while providing the same experience, an appropriate qualification for the work of Ito, assuming Koolhaas had no other intentions than to compliment his colleague. Observing Amant recalls this quote because here, as well, liteness is a distinct quality of the project. Although this might have negative connotations to some, this represents the right angle for me. For one, by including the offspring aspect: framing the work of SO – IL as part of a longer lineage, which indirectly relates to the work of Toyo Ito, through the practice of SANAA where both founders Jing and Florian worked The alignment of these offices might make the relationship more understandable. Because, in my experience, working in profiled offices often comes with meeting a strong ancestor.

IMG 05 and IMG 06 A fragment close-up / detail of the diagonal brickwork © SO – IL / © IWAN BAAN IMG 07 A fragment close-up / detail of the fence © SO – IL

The resonating of such figures seems intrinsically embedded in the thinking and modus operandi of many practices, even without being too conscious, just as a part of growing up. Hence, one strong ancestor at SANAA must have been Ito, as Kazuyo Sejima contributed to several projects.

This connection was also the focus of the 2016 MoMA exhibition: A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA and Beyond. Along the same line, SANAA is resonating in the practice of SO – IL. What does this mean? To a certain extent, this means a shared understanding of spatial manipulations, material strategies, overall expression, and atmosphere. And in this specific case, lightness and tactility. And let me quickly add to this: as part of the flourishing of a practice, over time, these ancestors gradually become dim voices. Or even fall utterly silent as further inventions and rare finds are made. Sometimes, this means a hard break with the ancestral vocabulary is deliberately sought. And often, a widening of this vocabulary is explored. The latter is a more productive attitude that I recognize in the work of SO – IL. And the second argument for considering ‘lite’ as a positive constellation instead of a homeopathic dilution has nothing to do with ancestry. The constant oscillation between assemblage and coherence makes me read and understand Amant as non-solid. And in this case, the non-solid brings a precious type of lightness. Conceived as a project assembled, which is cunningly played out on several scale levels. This is where the proper refreshment of lite comes for-

ward: the freedom of open, non-dogmatic combinations and gestures. I will elaborate on this.

Starting with the scale of the urban and the volumetric, the project weaves itself virtually unpretentious into the urban fabric of East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which is characterized by a mix of small businesses, workshops, and storages, accommodated in a fine graining of mute boxes and indifferent brick blocks.

Such are these blocks of SO – IL behaving, being rather dimmed and silent, yet relaxed and loosely inserted. And obeying most of the conventions the context offers. At first glance, the four structures follow the utilitarian stoic logic of simplicity and directness as they blend into the city fabric. Yet, the organic Lina Bo Bardi window on the street side is the first announcement of something fantastic.

Then, several subtle deformations show there is more to these new volumes, revealing more peculiarity. The slightly twisted wall announcing the entrance starts to catch the eye. In response to this, the volume across the street, with a kinked wall along the longitudinal side, announces the entrance halfway down a narrow alley. Both opposite kinks create a family bond between the volumes. A triangular canopy sticking out, indicating the entrance, expressed as if the cladding is a pulled-out textile, a gesture wholly integrated into the geometry of the diagonal brick bond.

Gestures such as this form the idea of an oversized garment, a cladding that is allowed to detach itself from its structure below. These deformations together show a deliberately sought-after imperfection. These are gestures of paramount importance, as they take the project gently away from the absolute rationale. By the disturbing and shaking of the volume’s geometry, imperfection comes along and brings a touch of tactility. All operations make the structures less abstract, more ‘made-by-hand,’ and more of something among us. Don’t misunderstand these as mistakes or any loss of control. Realizing pure and clear geometric forms already requires an effort, yet these geometric deformations require an even higher standard of sensitivity, subtlety, and a load of effort. Hence, the perfection of imperfection is an essential part of a formal and spatial gesture of assemblage here. Clearly, the boxes are being destroyed with meticulous ease.

Moving over to the spatial dimension and the plans of Amant, I can detect the contrary of the restrained appearance in the street. The robust and mute street side is just a mask for a more fragile

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GRATING DETAIL 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15

Fixed connection Slotted connection Metal coping CMU block Rigid foam insulation EIFS system EIFS parex water resistive air barrier Backer rod and sealant at joint to clip Facade grating vertical clip EIFS system avb / joint transition Metal through wall flashing Z-clip fastened to brick @ mortar joints Backer rod & sealant Liquid applied impermeable air/ vapor barrier Dogtooth pattern face brick

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Black iron framing Recessed led lights in perforations Gypsorb 60mm ceiling furring channels Structural slab Gypsorb 15/30 perforated gyp bd 1/2” thick Millwork cabinets

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AMANT BROOKLYN, NEW YORK 2017-2021 Client Lonti Ebers Program Artist studios, galleries, performance space, offices, and cafe.

Design 2017 Completion 2021 Project area Site area: 17,000 SF (Site area), 16,400 SF (Built indoor area), 21,000 SF (Total area incl. Indoor and outdoor) SO – IL Executive Team Florian Idenburg, Jing Liu, Kevin Lamyuktseung and Ted Baab SO – IL Design Team Pietro Pagliaro, Grace Lee, Sanger Clark, Lucia Sanchez-Ramirez, Álvaro Gómez-Sellés, Kristen Too, Sophie Nichols, Christopher Riley, Alexandre Hamlyn, Regina Teng, Etienne Vallat, Marisa Musing, Tyler Mauri, Julie Perrone, Mario Serrano, Diego Fernandez, Yuanjun Summer Liu and John Chow Architect of Record Andrew Reyniak Consultants Project Manager Paratus Group Structural Silman Associates MEP CES Engineering, Plus Group Engineering Lighting Buro Happold Engineering Cladding Consultant Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Civil Bohler Engineering

Expediter J. Callahan Consulting, Inc. Acoustics / AV / Security Harvey Marshall Berling Associates Concrete Reginald Hough Associates Geotechnical Langan Engineering, PMT Laboratories, Inc Landscape Future Green Graphics Linked by Air Images dust jacket - © Rafael Gamo page 02, 04, 22, 26, 39, 41, 43, 48, 49, 57, 59, 71 and 74 - © Naho Kubota page 08, 12, 13, 16, 17, 21, 30, 31, 32, 37, 47, 52, 53, 67, 68, 69, 72 and 73 - © Iwan Baan page 24, 28, 34, 36, 38 - Gala Porras-Kim, Precipitation for an Arid Landscape, 2021.

Courtesy of the artist and Amant page 62 - Courtesy of the artist and Amant.

Installation view of Dora García, Revolution, fulfill your promise!, 2021. © New Document.

Lonti Ebers Bruce Flatt

OUR MOST SPECIAL THANKS TO

Martino Stierli Job Floris Iwan Baan Naho Kubota

PUBLICATION DATA INFORMATION

COLLECTION LONG BOOKS VOLUME LB 17 TITLE SO – IL AMANT ISBN 978-989-53906-8-7 PUBLICATION DATE 2023 December EDITOR AND GENERAL MANAGER Ana Leal COLLECTION CONCEPT Tomás Lobo EDITORIAL TEAM Ana Leal, architect Filipa Figueiredo Ferreira, designer João Soares, architect SO – IL IN-HOUSE EDITORS Summer Liu Kevin Lamyuktseung PRINTING Graficamares LEGAL DEPOSIT 480255/21 RUN NUMBER 1000 numbered copies PUBLISHER AND OWNER AMAG publisher VAT NUMBER 513 818 367

/1000

CONTACTS hello@amagpublisher.com www.amagpublisher.com

Previous titles about this collection: LB 01 DAVID ADJAYE mole house LB 02 NICHOLAS BRUNS guimarães chapel LB 03 DAVID ADJAYE the webster LB 04 CARVALHO ARAÚJO casa na caniçada LB 05 ANDRÉ CAMPOS | JOANA MENDES centro coordenador de transportes LB 06 ANDRÉ CAMPOS | JOANA MENDES PEDRO GUEDES DE OLIVEIRA fábrica em barcelos LB 07 DAVID ADJAYE winter park library & events center LB 08 DAVID ADJAYE 130 william tower LB 09 BRANDENBERGER KLOTER ARCHITECTS community hall laufenburg LB 10 BRANDENBERGER KLOTER ARCHITECTS school pfeffingen LB 11 BRANDENBERGER KLOTER ARCHITECTS double kindergarten rüti LB 12 BRANDENBERGER KLOTER ARCHITECTS school aarwangen LB 13 BRANDENBERGER KLOTERARCHITECTS school birrwil LB 14 ANGELO CANDALEPAS the castle LB 15 PAUL MURDOCH ARCHITECTS flight 93 national memorial LB 16 ÁLVARO SIZA monte da lapa volume l

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