A G E N C Y

AGENCY at Pecha Kucha Night Roma

2011-06-19T16:25:00.003+02:00

AGENCY will present at Pecha Kucha Night Roma, Sunday June 19. The event will feature several short format presentations from artists, architects, and designers, including:

Startt (architects)
Insula (architects)
Ersela Kripa + Stephen Mueller / AGENCY (architects)
Freddy Ventriglia (graphic)
Marta Gargiulo + Mondo Bizzarro "Street art Diary" edizioni Castelvecchia
Allaboutpaula (designers)
Orizzontale (architects, designers)
Aira (motion graphic)
Boudewijn Kaijser + Riccardo Gola (architect + jazz musician)

Entry is free. Presentations begin at 20:20, and will be held at Circolo Degli Artisti, Via Casilina Vecchia 42, Roma. The event is curated by Ottavio Cialone and Francesco Lipari.

For more information from the event organizers, please visit their page on Facebook. To see other PKN presentations, and for details about the Pecha Kucha format and events in your city, go to pecha-kucha.org.

AGENCY at Frugal Architecture Symposium in Malta

2011-06-01T14:02:00.001+02:00

AGENCY has been invited to participate in the Frugal Architecture International Symposium this week in Malta. The event gathers some of the world's leading architects and creative thinkers to address the scarcity of resources in contemporary urban and rural environments.

Partners Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller will present a lecture entitled "Economies of Informality" on Thursday, June 2, and will participate in other events throughout the week, including an international design workshop.

Other participants in the symposium include:

Elena Barthel | Rural Studio, USA
Austin Camilleri | Artist, Malta
Franco La Cecla | Anthropologist and Architect, Italy
Nina Maritz | Nina Maritz Architects, Namibia
Luca Stasi | CTRL+Z Architects, Mexico, and
Sarah Wigglesworth | Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, UK
among others.

The event is organized by Architecture Project (Malta) and Abbate e Vigevano Architects (Italy). A detailed description of the event is available from the Times of Malta, and an event programme is available for download from KTP.

Stay tuned to the AGENCY blog for updates.

X LOCUS | Collaborative Installation at AAR

2011-04-27T10:21:00.000+02:00

On Thursday, April 28 at 8 PM in the cortile of the McKim, Mead and White Building at the American Academy in Rome there will be an opening reception for a collaborative installation entitled X LOCUS, featuring environmental media by Founders Rome Prize winners in Architecture Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller (AGENCY), sound by Elliott Carter Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition Paul Rudy, and lyrics by Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize winner in Modern Italian Studies Jennifer Scappettone.

X LOCUS explores senses of dislocation and repatriation in the communities of the Academy, Rome, and the respective backgrounds of those who pass through here via traversals of sound, text, and visual projections onto the introverted cortile space. The installation raises issues of placelessness and loss which cannot be represented as visual images; the organizers write, "Through a subversive use of the two-dimensional image in these shared spaces, we mean to generate experiences of reorientation."

X LOCUS will be on display Thursday, April 28 and Friday, April 29 from 8 to 10 PM, with an opening on Thursday.

AGENCY at 'MADE UP | Design's Fictions'

2011-01-05T16:33:00.000+01:00

AGENCY has been selected to participate in MADE UP | Design's Fictions, an upcoming exhibit, opening this month at Art Center College of Design. The exhibition is part of a two-month long exhibition and speaker series dedicated to exploring emergent themes in architectural practice.

A description of the exhibition from the event organizers:
To design anything, it is necessary to first imagine an audience, a site, a purpose, or even a world. It has to be made up. MADE UP: Design’s Fictions presents the work of major and emerging international practices that forecast, hypothesize, muse, skylark, role-play, put-on-airs, freak-out or otherwise fake-it to produce work that is relevant to our increasingly confusing and accelerated world.

As part of this groundbreaking exhibition, AGENCY will display their speculative design research project entitled Super Levee Urban Farm. To safeguard against future disaster from rising sea levels, the world’s cities must invest heavily in new forms of infrastructural development. Super Levee Urban Farm capitalizes on the need for urban improvement, expanding the necessary infrastructural and environmental interventions to propose a more productive urban and personal life. The project proposes a global system of levees, serving as a new brand of urban farms at the city’s edge, preserving local ecologies while protecting cities from emerging dangers.

EXHIBITION DETAILS
January 20 - March 20, 2011
Saturdays and Sundays 12 – 5 pm or by appointment
Wind Tunnel Gallery, South Campus, Art Center College of Design
950 South Raymond Ave., Pasadena, CA 91105

Featuring work by:
AGENCY
Aeolab
Juan Azulay
Stuart Bailey / Frances Stark
Juliette Bellocq
Commonwealth
Design I/O
Hernan Diaz Alonso
Andrew Friend
Justin Gier
Garnet Hertz
Thomas Hillier
Ben Hooker / Shona Kitchen
Ingrid Hora / Daniel Salomon
Coy Howard
Ed Keller / Yuval Borochov /
Lisa Ekle / Danil Nagy
Perry Kulper
The Planning Center
Keiichi Matsuda
Maywa Denki
Syd Mead
Metahaven
Microsoft
MOS
Oblong Industries
Sascha Pohflepp
Rojkind Arquitectos
Eddo Stern
Noam Toran
Julia Tsao
Jackson Wang
Chris Woebkin /
Natalie Jeremijinko

Additional contributions by:
Julian Bleecker
Ben Bratton
Norman Klein
Peter Lunenfeld
Geoff Manaugh
Fiona Raby

Installation by:
Tim Durfee and Like Now

Engineering: Buro Happold; Graphic Design: Brian Roettinger;

Programming: Ewan Branda; Project team: Haila Adamo, Laura
Goard, Fallon James, Mike Manalo, Matthew Manos, Salvador
Orara, Nicholas Paradowski, Bora Shin, Jayne Vidheecharoen

Curated by: Tim Durfee with Haelim Paek

AGENCY Profile in Abitare

2011-01-05T15:42:00.000+01:00

AGENCY is featured as the selected firm profile in the latest issue of Abitare. Read an interview with partners Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller, and learn more about the firm's philosophy, recent accomplishments, and upcoming projects in Issue 11 of Abitare Bulgaria, available at newstands now.

Special Correspondent Petya Ruseva muses on the firm name in her introduction:
"AGENCY – sounds active, important and… anonymous. Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller’s Bureau for research and design activities is well named: it has to work effectively, everywhere, to create networks."

Read the full introduction online, or pick up a copy of the print version to read the full article!

Photo Copyright AGENCY Architecture LLC 2010

AGENCY Lecture | Cornell in Rome

2010-11-01T15:00:00.002+01:00

AGENCY will present a lecture concerning recent work and research objectives, as part of the Cornell in Rome Fall 2010 Lecture Series, sponsored by the Cornell University College of Architecture, Art & Planning.

The lecture will be held November 15, 2010, at Palazzo Lazzaroni, Via del Barbieri 6, in the center of Rome.

This year's lecture series features a dynamic group of contemporary architects and artists, including Odile Decq, Fritz Haeg, and 2A+P/A.

See details for the event on Cornell's website here.

30S | Online Streaming

2010-10-18T22:19:00.004+02:00

View the submissions for 30S, a crowdsourced video installation project by AGENCY at the Venice Biennale, on the continuous, looping playlist above. Thank you to all who submitted videos for inclusion so far. The playlist continues to grow as new submissions are received, so check back often to find more videos.

The exhibit is presented by SUPERFRONT in collaboration with At Work With, and opens Tuesday, October 19, at the Nordic Pavilion, 5:00PM Venice time (CEST/UTC+2). Videos will be on display until Monday, November 22.

If you want to contribute with a video of your workspace, there is still time! Check out our Submission Guidelines to find out how you can be a part of the show as part of our rolling submissions. Contributor names and locations are listed on the YouTube video files, and will be credited officially on the AGENCY blog.

Contributors to date:
Spacelab Architects | Fermo
Joseph Baker | New York
Tor Lindstrand | Bucharest
Andy Bernheimer | Brooklyn
Johnny Naugahyde | Kansas City
Clarisa Diaz | Phnom Penh
Mimi Zeiger | Brooklyn
Fake Industries Architectural Agonism | New York
Keith Van de Riet | New York
Jana Vander Goot | Rome
Andrew Mikhael | Englewood
Fritz Haeg | Rome
Tyler Selby | Kansas City
Nina Ilieva | New York
Jeremy Mende | Rome
John Matteo | Rome
Marcella Del Signore | Rome
Cecil Castellucci | Los Angeles
Saman Hosseinipour | New York
Sarah Le Clerc | New York
Tyler Marshall | New York
David Garcia | Copenhagen
Tim Durfee | Los Angeles
Pavlina Gantcheva | New York
Franky Antimisiaris | Athens
Markus Bader | Bucharest
Heather Braun | New York
Raymond Williams IV | New York
Adam Gumowski | Los Angeles
Mitch McEwen | Brooklyn

30S | AGENCY at Venice Biennale for SUPERFRONT

2010-10-12T23:50:00.002+02:00

AGENCY has been selected to exhibit at the Venice Biennale (La Biennale di Venezia), acting as ambassadors for SUPERFRONT in collaboration with At Work With at the Nordic Pavilion to realize "30S", a crowdsourced video installation addressing the role of the architect in the design of public space.

Project Description
The project expands the theme of the 12th International Architectural Exhibition at the Venice Biennale to highlight the role of the festival itself in fabricating and amplifying the identity of the contemporary architect.

While “people meet in architecture”, the architect often operates in environments uncannily devoid of interpersonal contact. Paradoxically, it is from these most private spaces that our cities’ civic buildings and public spaces are designed.

The installation will linger in the private space of the architect, projecting a continuous stream of user-generated content from an installation-specific web-based video channel, acting as a clearinghouse for 30-second clips of static-shot digital video. Video will highlight the quotidian, intimate, and banal aspects of architectural endeavor, forcibly colluding these highly personal spaces with the public realm by means of digital projection into the exhibit space of the Pavilion.

AGENCY will host user-generated content in a continuous, looping stream on the AGENCY blog.

Read the Submission Guidelines for details on how to submit your film.

30S | Submission Guidelines

2010-10-12T23:00:00.005+02:00

You can be part of the exhibit!

AGENCY kindly asks that you film your primary architectural workspace from a static vantage point, for 30 seconds, during your normal workday.
Contributors are encouraged not to edit, alter, or tidy their workspace for purposes of the video, to leave all traces of productivity, personality, and creative expression.
Filmed workspaces should be where you spend the most time during the day, and can include computer stations, drafting tables, model shops, fabrication labs, construction sites, classrooms, or a host of other environments conducive to architectural endeavor.
No one should be filmed while working at the workstation. Just step away from your workstation and film what you see throughout the day. Your workstation, through your eyes.
Upload exactly 30 seconds of digital video to your account on YouTube, and email a link to your video to 30S@agencyarchitecture.com with 30S in the subject line. Please send a link only. Video files sent to this address, and links to other online video services will not be reviewed or shown.
For crediting purposes, please name your video on YouTube in the following format:

30S_AGENCY_FirstName_LastName_City

substituting your first name, last name, and location of video in the appropriate spaces

Full credit will be given to all contributors whose videos are shown as part of the exhibit.

The exhibit opens on Tuesday, October 19. Join AGENCY, The Nordic Pavillion, and SUPERFRONT in person, or over Skype for a special introduction to the project at 5:00pm Venice time (CEST/UTC+2). '30S' will be on display from October 19, 2010 through the end of the Biennale on November 22, 2010.

Submissions will be reviewed and accepted on a rolling basis until October 19, 2010. Late submissions will be reviewed and accepted on a weekly basis until November 21, 2010.

....

By uploading a video and submitting a link, you authorize that AGENCY will not be responsible for content, imagery, and other material uploaded for inclusion in the show, that the video conforms to YouTube's Terms of Use, and that the video does not include confidential or copyrighted material, inappropriate or sensitive material, or intellectual property that is not your own.

Debate | Social Architecture and Networks

2010-09-29T19:43:00.002+02:00

AGENCY will participate in a public debate entitled "Social Architecture and Networks" at eme3 2010 in Barcelona. Partners Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller will join Nicolas Bonnenfant of COLOCO, and members of Arquitecturas Colectivas and DJ Arquitectura in questioning the position of social architecture in contemporary practice.

The debate will be held on October 7, 2010 from 20:00 to 22:00 at the Centro de Cultura Contemporanea Barcelona . See the organizer's website for event details and updates.

Barcelona Eme3 2010

2010-09-20T15:00:00.000+02:00

AGENCY has been selected to exhibit work in the International Architectural Market at eme3 2010, an annual international architectural festival and exhibit in Barcelona. This year's exhibition will include work from several design firms from around the world who are interrogating the status quo in the fields of architecture and design. Projects will be displayed as part of a multidisciplinary festival, October 7-9, 2010, in the Hall at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB).

According to the event organizers:
"The main goal of eme3_2010 is to reflect and debate about the present situation of the architectural discipline and the role played by the architect, in order to rethink and reformulate its possibilities, its compromises and its limits. What can an architect 'do'?"

The Market is the most emblematic section of the three day event, which will also include lively discussions, debates, audiovisual presentations, and workshops surrounding the theme.

From CCCB's website:
Eme3 operates like an architectural market, with installations shown in lots, urban projects, workshops, lectures, debates, street events, music and films. The festival is targeted at all those who are interested in architecture, design and art in general. Eme3 offers visitors a chance to discover emerging architecture, and an opportunity to share discussions and reflections with renowned architects and designers.

AGENCY will exhibit its recent award-winning project, Super Levee Urban Farm, and will contribute to other events during the week. Stay tuned to the AGENCY blog to learn more.

Other practices participating in the exhibition include BIG/Bjarke Ingels Group, Atelier Bow Wow, dpr- barcelona, hackitectura, and many more.

Keep an eye on the organizer's website, and register for events here.

Seeking Space | Recap

2010-09-14T23:04:00.000+02:00

Thank you to all who attended Seeking Space | Appropriated Environments in Long Island City, AGENCY's public program in LIC earlier this month.

The public discussion at the Noguchi Museum Education Space drew a wonderful crowd, including students, designers, architects, artists, and local residents interested in the unique character of their community. We were pleased to meet so many likeminded and engaged individuals, and to learn more about the LIC community from their point of view.

Many followed for the tour, where we were joined by others for the walk through Socrates Sculpture Park, the LIC Community Boathouse launchpoint at Hallet’s Cove, Two Coves Community Garden, and the Welling Court Mural Project. The tour was greatly augmented with informal talks and question-and-answer sessions with Alyson Baker (Exec. Director, Socrates Sculpture Park), and Rebekah Tuffey (Two Coves Community Garden), who spoke passionately about their first-hand experience, and the rich history of these incredible sites.

For those who missed it, we've copied notes and slides from the presentation, with photos from the tour below:

On the edge of the most densely populated metropolis in the US, Long Island City is host to a growing number of unlikely spaces. The area’s sprawling and fragmented urban fabric is uniquely suited to public and private enterprises that recognize the potential of the neglected, forgotten, misunderstood, and invisible zones of the contemporary city.

Certain individuals and social groups exhibit a finely tuned awareness of the potential in otherwise neglected urban environments. Without the resources afforded other city dwellers, these “space seekers” can help us to reimagine the city, both by seeing the beauty and potential already infused in its most inhospitable environments, and in imagining new use within the normalized urban fabric.

Where the rest of us see only the opportunities presented to us, these people have an uncanny ability to create opportunity for themselves, opening both social and physical space in a city that notoriously covets both.

How is the “space” of the contemporary global city changing? While developing countries rapidly industrialize, developed countries are completing their transition into full service economies. The historic industrial fabric of cities and entire regions is thereby stripped of its intended use. Entire companies are outsourced to developing countries, where labor is cheap and production is less restricted, leaving formerly lively zones vacant and underused, forgotten.

At the same time, our cities’ populations are rapidly expanding. Without factory and production jobs in rural and exurban development, workers are moving to the city to find their place in the new economy. Upon relocation, many are finding that space is unavailable, or that it comes at a premium beyond their means. Many are turning to the least desirable spaces of the city to find an affordable lifestyle, while maintaining the benefits that an urban lifestyle would provide.

Without the burden of prescriptive urbanism, these individuals are uniquely endowed with the capacity to redefine the contemporary city, turning seeming disadvantage into novel and productive urban form.

Ersela Kripa + Stephen Mueller / AGENCY conduct Public Discussion in Noguchi Museum Education Space

Ersela Kripa / AGENCY leading group through Noguchi Museum

Socrates Sculpture Park

Hallet's Cove

Stephen Mueller / AGENCY leading tour at Hallet's Cove

Two Coves Community Garden

Two Coves Community Garden

Two Coves Community Garden

Welling Court Mural Project

Photos ©2010 AGENCY and H.B. Oko

Stephen Mueller and Ersela Kripa are 2010 Artist Fellowship recipients of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). This presentation is co-sponsored by Artists and Audiences Exchange, a NYFA public program, funded with leadership support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA).

Seeking Space

2010-08-25T22:36:00.001+02:00

AGENCY is developing a public program entitled Seeking Space| Appropriated Environments in Long Island City, an investigation of the unique conditions that give rise to vital and vibrant public space in otherwise neglected and forgotten urban zones.

EVENT DESCRIPTION

On the edge of the most densely populated metropolis in the US, Long Island City is host to a growing number of unlikely spaces. The area’s sprawling and fragmented urban fabric is uniquely suited to public and private enterprises that recognize the potential of the neglected, forgotten, misunderstood, and invisible zones of the contemporary city.

Join Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller, founding partners of AGENCY, as they conduct a public discussion and guided tour of these transformative spaces in and around Long Island City, highlighting methods of site identification, and tactics for appropriate, responsible, and sustainable intervention in similar environments.

The tour will end at the Noguchi Museum for its First Friday extended hours. Enjoy the garden in the evening with wine or beer cash bar.

This program is made possible through the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Artist and Audience Exchange Program, and the generous support of Socrates Sculpture Park, the Noguchi Museum, Two Coves Community Garden, and other artist and community groups in LIC.

EVENT DETAILS
3 September 2010

3:00 PM - 3:45 PM
Public Discussion
Noguchi Art Museum Education Space

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Public Tour
Noguchi Art Museum and environs
Socrates Sculpture Park
Two Coves Community Garden
other sites TBD

This event is open to the public and free of charge.

RSVP for Discussion and / or Public Tour here.
Spaces for the tour are limited, and will be reserved in the order RSVPs are received.

Stay tuned to the AGENCY blog for updates, tour dates, and further details. Please contact us to learn how you or your organization can get involved.

Stephen Mueller and Ersela Kripa are 2010 Artist Fellowship recipients of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). This presentation is co-sponsored by Artists and Audiences Exchange, a NYFA public program, funded with leadership support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA).

Super Levee Urban Farm | Competition Boards

2010-07-30T20:29:00.000+02:00

What exactly is a Super Levee Urban Farm? Click on the original competition boards below, or download the PDF here to find out.

ONE PRIZE Award Ceremony and Exhibition

2010-07-26T15:30:00.004+02:00

Join AGENCY at the ONE PRIZE Award Ceremony and Exhibition at the Trespa Showroom on Thursday, July 29 at 6:30PM.

AGENCY's winning proposal will be exhibited, along with the work of our co-winner and four competition finalists.

Speakers at the event will include: Adrian Benepe (Commissioner, NYC Department of Parks & Recreation) Dickson Despommier (Ph.D. Professor, Columbia University and Director of the Vertical Farm Project), Mitchell Joachim (Ph.D. Co-Founder, Terreform ONE, Faculty, New York University), and Maria Aiolova (Co-Founder, Terreform ONE, Faculty, Parsons the New School for Design).

Find out more details, and register for the event on Trespa's website.

AGENCY Wins ONE PRIZE

2010-07-20T16:00:00.004+02:00

AGENCY's speculative proposal for a new coastal urban infrastructure has been selected as a co-winner of the ONE PRIZE, an international design competition for creating productive green space in cities hosted by Terreform 1.

Our proposal, entitled Super Levee Urban Farm, orchestrates a networked ecology of indigenous and agricultural plant and wildlife to protect existing and emerging cities from the dangers of rising sea levels and water-borne disasters. Each stage of the terraced levee supports the next. Clippings, compost, and surplus crops from farming levels are used as nutrients and food for a series of fish farms, marshes, and restorative dune ecologies. Waste from marine life and nutrients from algal habitats are then used to fertilize farm levels, making the levee a complete ecology.

Over 200 entries were submitted for the competition, with two winners, four finalists, and twenty-five semifinalists chosen from the field by a jury representing a variety of backgrounds and disciplines, including architectural, urban, landscape, and humanitarian design, public policy, business, experimental media, agriculture, and ecology.

Congratulations to our co-winners (a team comprised of members from the Thread Collective and thegreenest.net), finalists, and semi-finalists, for their exceptional and inspiring work, and well-deserved recognition.

Stay tuned to the AGENCY blog for project updates and further discussion.

NYFA Artists Fellowship 2010

2010-06-11T14:38:00.009+02:00

Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller are 2010 fellows in Architecture/Environmental Structures from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Congratulations to all the other fellows! You can read more about the award, and find a complete list of this year's winners and past NYFA fellows on the NYFA website. Be sure to check out the names you know page for a look at how this important program has supported some of the best New York-based artists for the last 25 years. The list includes prominent artists and writers across a variety of disciplines, including film, photography, music, painting, dance, and architecture.

NYFA's official press release for the 2010 Artists Fellowship program is available here.

Keep an eye on our blog for updates on AGENCY projects and initiatives that will benefit from this generous funding, and for ways that you can get involved. Thanks to NYFA and all our friends for your support.

Rome Prize 2010-2011

2010-04-16T17:20:00.003+02:00

Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller are winners of the Founders Rome Prize in Architecture 2010-2011.

Starting this September, they will both spend 11 months at the American Academy in Rome, developing their project entitled Hackable Infrastructures: Inhabiting the Margins of Contemporary Rome.The project extends and tests AGENCY's previous speculative projects, hackable infrastructures for the contemporary city.

We would like to thank the Academy and the Board of Trustees for supporting us and our project, and for providing us with what will surely be the opportunity of a lifetime.

We would also like to thank The MacDowell Colony, for its generous support of the initial research and project proposals that make this project possible.
...

Below is a brief project description and outline of research and work to be completed during our time in Rome:

We propose to study the forced movement of the Romani in Rome, to establish an understanding of the contemporary city as a network of superimposed degrees of mobility, to find sites of convergence where the Romani and the Roman might benefit from co-habitation, and to propose infrastructural and architectural frameworks to enable the preservation and co-habitation of Roma and Roman culture.

Drawing on a rich history of Roman infrastructural and civic typologies that have been repurposed over the course of the city's legacy, and engaging the current objectives of the rapidly developing metropolis, we will investigate appropriate forms for such an intervention. Developing and testing our speculations of a "hackable" infrastructure for the contemporary city, we will benefit from direct contact with Roma and Sinti culture, its advocates, and the designers and planners of modern Rome to develop site-specific infrastructural interventions that address the intensifying Roma housing and sociological crisis.

We hope to further develop our relationships with Roma advocates, and architects for the City of Rome, who can provide assistance and guidance in developing our research and proposals, and communicating our ideas to improve Roma conditions. With their support, we will be able to visit Roma / Sinti camps throughout metropolitan Rome, and experience first-hand the conditions we plan to address.

The project will be realized in the form of architectural drawings, digital and physical models, and architectural renderings. Research and support material will be produced through a variety of data visualization techniques, utilizing datasets from city government and other sources (GIS mapping, demographics, population density, traffic patterns, etc.) to visualize the confluence of Romani and Roman cultures and appropriate sites of exchange.

The final product will take the form of an illustrated research text and architectural portfolio of the proposals, outlining a new agenda for the responsible development of metropolitan Rome. Specific to the local conditions and populations of Rome, but applicable in a larger sense to the problem of the city in a rapidly urbanizing and globalized world, the work will serve as a prototypical case study on the feasibility and potential effects of actively embracing the margin, while rethinking the priorities of city planning, urban development, and architectural design.

...

For a complete list of 2010-2011 Rome Prize winners and projects, and to download a PDF of the Rome Prize Ceremony Brochure, please visit the Academy's website.

Stay tuned for project updates and developments on life and work at the Academy.

UNPLANNED Opening at Superfront LA

2010-03-31T20:24:00.001+02:00

The UNPLANNED exhibit opening last week at Superfront LA enjoyed a great turnout. Special thanks to Mitch McEwen and the rest of the Superfront crew for making the event and the exhibit such a success.

If you missed the event, check out work from AGENCY and a collection of other artists, architects, and designers, on display at the gallery through July 2. You can also order a copy of the exhibit catalog, featuring essays from Mitch McEwen, Ines Moreira, Geoff Manaugh, David Turnbull, and Cristina Goberna Pesudo, available from Blurb.com here.

Urban Metabolism

2010-02-12T21:42:00.000+01:00

Accelerated cycles of consumption change the face of a city block.

A century ago, the block between Grand and McGee on 11th Street was a shining example of Kansas City’s dynamic, pedestrian-friendly urban retail corridors. Filled with street-level shops of all types, the block provided an enjoyable and ever-changing experience for the urbanite. The block charted the optimistic character of a growing consumer culture, celebrating the shifting needs and desires of the populace.

In the 1920’s, the shopping experience was transforming from a personal, practical need to a spectacular social event, and this city block was responsive to the changing culture.

The Browning King’s clothing store posted World Series results on its streetfront billboard, attracting crowds of lingering sports fans.

Moore-Photographs store, Rompel Art Co. Picture Framing and Fine Furs on 11th Street were busily frequented by shoppers and traveling patrons. Their modernizing practices amplified the energy of their clientele, with pulsing cycles of merchandise delivery, window displays, and storefronts.

The six-story Kupper Hotel hosted out-of-town shoppers, wishing to stay overnight after short-stay shopping trips to the surrounding area.

Shopping was becoming the definitive urban activity, to be experienced within tightly controlled environments, and tightly controlled timeframes. With each subsequent visit to this evolving urban environment, the shopper’s experience and expectations were re-invented anew.

With the increasing economy and ease of personal travel offered by the automobile, the block became even more conducive to this instant commercial gratification, accelerating the speed and frequency of each shopper’s visits. It soon became apparent that, in order to facilitate the increasing speed of commerce, the physical fabric of the block itself would need to change.

The entire block was demolished.

A new, seven-story parking structure went up in its place.

The Shoppers Parkade, completed in 1969, embodied the new form of commercial urbanism. Supplying easy access to the new urban shoppers and their automobiles, the Parkade also provided the very retail environments that were their draw, incorporating shops under the parking deck at street level.

The same forces that catalyzed such a hyperbolic conception of life as an urban commuter would soon lead to its decay. By facilitating competition, market pressures, and planned obsolescence, projects like the Parkade made it possible for retail hubs to emerge throughout the city. Easy access and unchecked speed were the new paradigm, and shoppers would seek out the biggest, newest, and most convenient area to spend their time and money. The shopping center was decentralized.

Soon, the shopping district at 11th and Grand, and the Shopper’s Parkade, lost their appeal. The multi-story parking deck stood vacant, with high levels of crime and drug-dealing hosted in the shadows of its dark ramps.

---
After years of neglect and concern, its is time once again to re-imagine the block.

The Downtown Development Group, a chapter of the Downtown Council of Kansas City, decided to demolish the Shopper’s Parkade, at a cost of almost $1.4 million, partly borrowed from federal loans and partly from city funds.

In its place will be a surface parking lot.

Demolition is well underway, and the effect on the urban fabric of the area is already clear. In a race to increase the speed and ease of access to the area, the very reasons for that speed and ease are obliterated. Replacing shops with parking decks, and parking decks with surface lots, the city has cannibalized its core.

By so emphatically embracing the logics of commerce in the conception of public space, the experience of the city is subject to the whims of the market. In the current economic environment, investment in a surface parking lot has substantial security, especially compared to other, more risky ventures like commercial or residential development. Paradoxically, as the city seeks to enable growth and facilitate access, it is investing in its own destruction.

The city must imagine a new relationship with commerce, and automobile culture, if it is to survive as a viable living environment, and a desired commercial destination. As consumer culture shifts its focus from goods to services and beyond, the city too must respond in kind.

This article originally appeared on kcfreepress.com.

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PKN: Hackable Infrastructures - Recap

2010-02-09T18:15:00.000+01:00

Thanks to everyone who came out to Pecha Kucha Night last week at Crosstown Station. A crowd of over 300 people attended, and 10 presenters shared their thoughts and work. It was great to see some familiar faces, and meet some like-minded designers and supporters from the KC arts community. Special thanks to Young Architects Forum for inviting us to share our work.

AGENCY presented its 'Hackable Infrastructures' initiative. Copied below is an excerpt of our presentation:
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HACKABLE INFRASTRUCTURES
There is a long history of innovation in informal environments, where populations make do with what little resources are made available to them, often “hacking into” existing infrastructural systems, and inventing new systems independent of formal frameworks.

Learning from these examples, how can we as architects and designers plan for the unplanned?

How can we embrace the unexpected?

Can we find a way to concede control of even a fraction of our built environments, so that they may be used in ways we as designers could never foresee?

How can we open up a space for the informal, the marginalized, the displaced, and the underadvantaged as we design for the comparatively privileged?

AGENCY has developed a series of speculative projects for the contemporary, global city. Projects that we call “Hackable Infrastructures”, where new urban improvements are designed to create such a space. A space of opportunity.

By identifying sites of potential exchange between formal infrastructural improvement, and the needs of an informal or marginalized community, we tactically propose solutions that would bridge the gaps. Gaps between prescribed uses, and potential appropriation. Gaps between today’s needs, and tomorrow’s emergencies.

As developed countries around the world race to upgrade their national networks of energy, transportation, telecommunications, and water distribution, we, as designers, will be called upon to decide the image, and the reality of such progress. In our efforts, and in our designs, we should not forget the local and global communities on which that progress depends.

PKN: Hackable Infrastructures (Update)

2010-01-28T18:00:00.001+01:00

EVENT DETAILS
AGENCY will present Hackable Infrastructures at Kansas City's Eighth Pecha Kucha Night next week, on Thursday, February 4th. The event will be held at Crosstown Station (1522 Mcgee KCMO). Attendance is free, and these events are popular, so arrive early to ensure a good seat for all the presentations. Doors open at 7:30pm, and presentations start at 8:20pm. We hope to see you there.

New to Pecha Kucha? The organizers describe what to expect:
PechaKucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of conversation ("chit chat"), it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds. It's a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

Learn more about the format and content of the evening here.

On February 20th, Pecha Kucha events around the world will raise awareness and funds for Haiti reconstruction. Learn more about this exciting initiative, and watch a Pecha Kucha presentation outlining its goals here.

Want to get involved? Stay posted on upcoming events in your area by visting the international Pecha Kucha website. If you're in the KC area, you can find all the information you need on Pecha Kucha KC's website.

Global AGENCY

2010-01-26T18:00:00.004+01:00

The AGENCY network is growing, and we would love to hear from you. Do you have experience designing for informal communities in emerging countries? Have you worked with or been a part of a community in need of tactical design? Follow Informal Urbanisms on our blog to learn how AGENCY is trying to help. Post a comment, or send us an email to share your thoughts.

Transient Space

2010-01-25T22:28:00.005+01:00

A historically lively intersection sees new life as a center of transportation and informal gathering .

In the 1950’s the corner of 11th and Main enjoyed a busy street life, with many small-scale storefronts inviting pedestrians to walk about and shop. Like most Kansas City intersections, this site was responsive to conditions of local topography, with 10th Street dead-ending on either side of Main Street to navigate a steep hill. The offset intersection lent to a bottleneck of crowded activity.

While a fun place for socializing shoppers, the offset of 10th Street was not readily conducive to the easy flow of pedestrian and automobile traffic.

The intersection has since been reconfigured to allow for a more complex public transport system. The bottleneck has been opened, so 10th street proceeds uninterrupted across Main. The former site of Rothschild’s clothing store has been given over to waiting areas, drive-thru lanes, and drop-offs for citywide bus routes. Neighboring buildings, once lively with activity, have been demolished to provide quick-service retail, a pharmacy, and several parking garages. The corner is flanked by private office buildings, whose large marble lobbies are uninviting to the casual passerby, and the Public Library, which draws large crowds both inside and out.
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Despite a seemingly negligent attitude toward pedestrian safety and public welfare, the intersection in its current configuration is a hotbed of activity, filled throughout the day with busy commuters, library patrons, and those looking for work. The space functions as an easily recognizable, and easily reached meeting place, where one can meet a friend, safe from the bustling traffic surrounding four sides of the intersection.

How can a space so clearly intended to be experienced in motion have such appeal to those needing a place to stay?

The nearby Public Library is part of the answer. Augmenting the transient public space with real amenities, like the café, restrooms, and internet access stations, the library allows a secondary cycle of movement in the space, from public exterior to public interior. Transitioning between the two, the plaza-dweller moves from a social space to personal space and back again. This cycle can be sustained indefinitely; one can spend entire days looking for work and reading while keeping a finger on the pulse of an ever-changing social circle.

The library is not the only piece of the puzzle, however, for this space is truly defined by that which it lacks. Circumscribed by multi-story parking decks and speeding city traffic, the space is devoid of any prescribed function, other than the support of mobility and transit. Such a space is easily appropriated for other uses, as mobility demands a vacuum, an open and smooth space free of impediment or obstruction of any kind. It is this openness that draws the plaza-dweller to the site, a field of limitless possibility and personal freedom in an otherwise regimented and precisely delineated urban realm. Dwarfed by the surrounding structures, and blurred by the speed of passing vehicles, the individual can be left surprisingly and pleasantly alone, simultaneously alienated and empowered by the modern city.

The new transit plaza is just as busy as the bottlenecked intersection used to be, and remains so throughout the day and seasons. No longer consigned only to shopping, the image of social and commercial life in the plaza is constantly in flux. Upon entering the transient space, the city dweller defines the space’s use anew, changing from hour to hour, and day to day. What appears an empty wedge in an empty downtown is surprisingly full of people and conversations, music and laughter.

This article originally appeared on kcfreepress.com.

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UNPLANNED: Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale

2010-01-19T18:45:00.003+01:00

AGENCY will exhibit Hackable Infrastructures, architectural and urban proposals for the contemporary city, on display at SUPERFRONT LA , from March 25 through July 2nd, 2010. Press release from SUPERFRONT copied below.
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SUPERFRONT is proud to present UNPLANNED: Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale, the first SUPERFRONT LA exhibit of 2010. A group exhibit with more than twenty participants, UNPLANNED spans architecture, urban design, industrial design, conceptual art, and cartography to present an array of experimental work at the urban scale. Multidisciplinary practitioners address emergent urbanism, “wild building”, and other alternatives to conventional urban planning.

The exhibit is curated by SUPERFRONT Founder + Director Mitch McEwen with Associate Curator Cecilia Brock and Projects Director Wendy Gilmartin.

Work is exhibited in multiple formats, from physical models to drawings, animations,software applications, consumer products, and live film. Dealing with urban situations from derelict construction sites to refugee camps, favelas, temporary housing and other contemporary spatial phenomena, the exhibition confronts the current economic crises and larger issues of globalization.

Participants include architectural and urbanist collectives ae.i.ou (San Juan), Salottobuono (Venice), and Tomorrow's Thoughts Today (London), as well as Francisca Benitez (New York), Benjamin Cadena (Brooklyn), McLain Clutter (University of Michigan TCAUP), Alex Delaunay (New York/Paris), Johanna Ferrer Guldager and Stine Laurberg Hansen (Copenhagen/ Los Angeles), Dennis Maher (Buffalo), curator Mitch McEwen (SUPERFRONT), Riitta Oittinen (Helsinki), Hyeri Park (Seoul/Delft), Dubravka Sekulić (Belgrade/Maastricht), Alvaro Urbano (Madrid/Berlin), architects AGENCY (New York), ZellnerPlus (Los Angeles), the multi-disciplinary INABA (Los Angeles), an advanced architecture studio at Columbia GSAPP taught by Mabel Wilson, and a student workshop from the Southern California Institute of Architecture directed by Micheal Pinto of Project Food / LA (Los Angeles).

UNPLANNED opens March 25th with reception 5pm – 8pm. On view through July 2nd, 2010.

Commuter City: Introduction

2010-01-14T18:00:00.005+01:00

AGENCY is contributing an ongoing feature on the effects and potential of automotive culture in Kansas City to the new hyperlocal news source, KCFreePress. Our introduction is available to view online, and expanded below.

COMMUTER CITY
by Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller

Kansas City’s urban core has systematically been relegated to the automobile, at the expense of pedestrian safety and urban density.

Over the last 75 years, Kansas City has transformed from a dense, walkable, urban fabric to one that focuses on the ease of commute and commerce afforded by the automobile and its various urban proxies. Parking decks, garages, and surface lots are matched only by lanes of limited access highway in providing a recognizable image of the city. Historic landmarks, office buildings, and notable centers of exchange and commerce have slowly given way to the needs of the car and the exurban commuter, demolished to provide space to house the increasing number of cars visiting the city each day.

While the slow degradation of Kansas City’s urban core is nothing new to the American city, here it is hyperbolically intertwined with the history and future of automobile culture, creating truly unique forms of urban interaction unforeseen by the planners of pedestrian cities centuries ago.

In an attempt to reclaim an architectural image of the city, new structures mirror the speed and scale embodied by the car, with dynamic and iconic forms easily recognizable against the skyline from the city’s high-speed transit corridors. Lavish attention is given not only to the design of new structures for public and civic interaction, but to the parking structures that help deliver the public to these venues. Some of the most innovative structural and aesthetic achievements of the addition to the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art are found, not in the luminous volumes scattered in the lawn, but in the subterranean parking garage, where light bounces through an artwork in the reflecting pool above and dances across concrete “wave tees”, celebrating automotive arrival. Various garages in the Central Business District show more thought and care to their proportioning and facades than most commercial buildings, blurring the distinction between spaces for the human and spaces for the car. Other garages become artworks themselves, transformed into full-height murals and iconography, like the now-famous “Bookshelf” garage at the Public Library.

The emphasis on automobile urbanism in the city has a long legacy in the conception and transformation of Kansas City’s urban fabric. From the onset of automobile travel in the United States, the city has been at the leading edge of infrastructural development for the car. The stretch of I-70 connecting Kansas and Missouri was one of the first completed sections of the national interstate system. Kansas City currently leads the nation in lanes of limited access highway per capita, exceeding second-place Dallas by over twenty percent.

With so much historical attention to the development of high-speed access in and around the city, the needs of the car have begun to outweigh the needs of the citizen, permeating everyday social life to an unmatched degree. Residents choose areas of the city with quick access to highways, often commuting long distances to or from the city each day to work. Shopping and entertainment choices are increasingly based on proximity and cost of public parking, with each new attraction obliged to provide more spaces for cheaper costs than its neighbors and competition.

In the weeks and months ahead, we will investigate the past, present, and future of automobile urbanism in Kansas City, outlining its precedents, manifestations, and effects on urban and archiectural culture, elaborating on the pitfalls and possibilities afforded by a culture in motion. We hope you join us for the ride.

This article originally appeared on kcfreepress.com.

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PARKING DISTRIBUTION, DOWNTOWN KANSAS CITY

(orange) public parking; (light orange) private parking; (light green) public park; (gray) building

Nation Building Aesthetics Part II : The Appropriation of Paradox

2010-01-09T18:00:00.014+01:00

TIRANA'S ARTIST-MAYOR EMBRACES DIFFERENCE AND DECAY TO REVITALIZE A LAGGING CITY:

Tirana has entered the world stage due in large part to the values and actions of its mayor, Edi Rama. A former artist, Rama has transformed the city through a variety of policies directed toward improving the common welfare through urban renewal and beautification. A firm believer in the power of the built environment to alter human perception and enrich lives, Rama brings to Tirana an artistic sense of optimistic activism and immediacy so often lost in the bureaucratic management of policy.

Honored with the award for “World Mayor” in 2004, Rama has gained international notoriety for himself and his city, opening Tirana to a much wider audience than previously possible. While tourism and investment remain relatively stable, the government’s assessment of the city’s future appears overwhelmingly confident, establishing international competitions for the design of major spaces in the public realm.

A unique brand of civic intervention, the policies all seem predicated on a model of minimum investment -- high return. Unlike similar models in more financially healthy environments, the goal in this case is not necessarily achieving quantifiable capital improvements, but at least maintaining the appearance of having done so.

Manifested most famously by the “Edi Rama Colors”, (a civic beautification project whereby the mayor orchestrated a troop of local artists and painters to put a new face on the deteriorating communist-era apartment blocks), the programs reach well beyond the bottom line and deep into the psyche of the city’s inhabitants.

Historically (and especially in Tirana during communism), public architecture has served to illustrate and glorify the powers of the state. But here architecture is foregone, acquiescing to the power of image residing solely in the pictoral surface of building. A thin layer of paint transformed the city from an internalized chaos to a statement of assurance broadcast worldwide. This seemingly trivial act has enormous repercussions for the positioning of Tirana’s citizens relative to each other, and the positioning of Albania in relation to the world.

Tirana, 2006. Photo © Copyright AGENCY / Ersela Kripa + Stephen Mueller

What is remarkable in the strategy of Mayor Rama and his associates is the intentional, and clever way it subverts a power dynamic once thought impenetrable. By leveraging publicity against resources, they capitalize on the power of negative, and even neutral attention to their gaping infrastructural and architectural deficit, which can now be seen as a commodity. As they expose the decrepit nature of the building stock, they generate publicity, dialogue, and the capacity to create wealth, in an economic environment once thought stagnant and irretrievable. By exposing their flaws instead of correcting them, they turn disadvantage into advantage.

This is not unlike strategies used by a team of guerilla artists operating in dilapidated neighborhoods of Detroit, “tagging” entire buildings in an eye-catching Day-Glo orange, bringing the derelict structures to the attention of city officials and rendering the status quo remarkable for the local residents who have capitulated their coexistence for so long. By promoting a higher level of visibility for the structures, this method and the Rama method promote a higher level of consciousness for the built environment in general, and a sense of complicit responsibility for its maintenance and development.

The Rama method also capitalizes on some potent characteristics of human psychology and social conditioning, by exposing and manipulating the human’s predilection towards establishing identity and difference. It is within the most assimilated environments that difference can make the most positive impact, and Rama, as an artist, has instinctively grasped this. The slightest asymmetry or disproportion is celebrated in a field of non-distinct substrates, and the overall impression of beauty is elevated for the environment as a whole, just as facial features and nuances of figuration that would otherwise go unnoticed are amplified and desired in men and women in uniform.

Tirana, 2006. Photo © Copyright AGENCY / Ersela Kripa + Stephen Mueller

Disfigurement and imperfection can now be widely understood as exceptional forms of rare beauty, in an otherwise homogenized field of similarity. Thus the recent trends for “awkward”, or “gawky”, or otherwise assertively “real” models and supermodels storming the runways of the fashion world. By translating these aesthetic conceits into pragmatic action, Rama has transcended the role of the artist and the politician, and has assumed the role of image consultant for the city of Tirana.

By capitalizing on a societal predisposition to be intrigued by both the outlandish and the tragically misfortuned, Mayor Rama has been able to use the unfortunate circumstances of recent history as a background for his publicity machine. Without any real investment, besides the creativity of his staff and fellow artists, he has been able to turn Tirana’s misfortune into a profitable enterprise, not only for the bank accounts of Tirana’s citizens, but for their minds as well.

Imagine what such a strategy might yield for any number of disadvantaged people of the world. There is much evidence to support that similar appeals to humanity’s simultaneous impulses to be both fascinated by destruction, and willing to help, have been met with overwhelming response. Rescue workers trying to locate the coordinates of crashed aircraft and lost hikers have crowdsourced global scavenger hunts, banking on these very principles. With minimal investment, save innovations in photo software plug-ins, real-time networking, or file sharing, those agencies have been able to tap the power of otherwise disengaged individuals. Disaster areas and areas of humanitarian crisis have benefitted from the same sort of increased interest and accessibility, with applications like Google Earth’s user-generated mapping programs, where geographic data, news stories, message boards, and fund-raising are ingeniously interrelated to both benefit the victims, and keep the thrill of the novelty alive for those feeding an ingrained instinct to observe tragedy.
Rama’s unique brand of aesthetic urbanism not only benefits from astute observation of the personal human condition, but the interpersonal, or collective condition as well. It is clear that the projects intend a much larger effect than their immediate surroundings, hoping to start a contagion of urban renewal, and international media attention for the city of Tirana and the nation of Albania as a whole.

The project is successful by immediately providing the collective with a sense of accomplishment, a “beautified” environment that would translate into the moods of individuals, and their approval of their setting. This is proliferated through mimicry, whereby an individual’s state of mind is directly affected not only by his surroundings, but by his actions, demeanor, and the demeanor of those around him. As this concept is extended to include the built environment as an active “other”, in a series of intersubjective exchanges predicated on lighthearted expression and frivolity, it becomes clear that the change in “mood” for the city would be self-replicating from the simplest of interventions.
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Tirana, 2006. Photo © Copyright AGENCY / Ersela Kripa + Stephen Mueller

This article is excerpted from our illustrated research text entitled Nation Building Aesthetics, avaiable for purchase on Lulu.

Informal Urbanisms Event at La Esquina

2010-01-07T21:36:00.010+01:00

Thanks to everyone who braved the snow to attend our event at La Esquina Gallery this Wednesday. Special thanks to our friends at Urban Culture Project, C+G Construction, Boulevard Brewery, and Fresher Than Fresh for making the night such a success.

Below is a transcript of our introduction to the evening and photos from the event.

INFORMAL URBANISMS: THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD

We’re all here tonight because we share an interest in the city. We have an audience of architects, urban designers, researchers, aid workers, and interested citizens with a stake in cities around the world. The city continues to be an unmistakable expression of humanity in all its modes. Tonight we will talk about its emerging forms, its people, its dreams, and its possible futures.

The world is urbanizing. For the first time in history more than half of the global population is living in cities. And this number is only expected to grow.

At the same time, using conservative estimates, over half of the population is living in poverty.

With substantial overlap between these two staggering figures, over 1 Billion people are living in urban slums. The majority of development throughout the world will continue to be primarily informal, extralegal, and transpolitical for years to come. It is a new paradigm. Slums are the cities of the future.

As architects and urbanists, we should recognize that the modernist dream of the rationally planned city has decidedly become an obsolete model. As we expend our energies on commissioned projects in comparatively wealthy countries and cities, we ignore the reality of much of the world.

While the planned city densifies, the unplanned city grows. Demonstrating a unique logic, often taking advantage of circumstance and seemingly negligible opportunities to stake a claim for survival.

Favelas, shantytowns, transit camps, refugee camps, and squatter settlements have become the new face of the city, emerging in response to crises both natural and man-made. These seemingly temporary solutions for living have become permanent fixtures, some rivaling the size and complexity of the world-class metropolis.

Historical approaches to intervention in these environments have failed.

Leading organizations of the developed world have taken one of two approaches : to cite the unique examples of success stories to justify leaving the developing world to its own devices, or to lend a helping hand with sustained humanitarian aid.

The first approach, suggesting the developing world “pull itself up by its bootstraps” is largely used as an excuse to maintain the status quo, offering improvements in name only.

The second approach, sustained humanitarian aid, creates bureaucracies and systems of hierarchy independent of the local population. The voice of the local community is often lost, replaced or distorted by a foreign organization.

New models for development must be imagined.

AGENCY has developed a research objective, that we call “Informal Urbanisms”, that attempts to codify and extrapolate the logic of informal settlements, to learn from their failures, and draw on their various tactics, to imagine new possiblities.

We are interested primarily in areas of the world where the pressures of urbanization and informality co-exist, hotbeds of architectural and urban invention.

Informal developments in this environment can provide valuable insight to designers, planners, and humanitarian organizations interested in their future, and the future of cities in the developed world.

Disadvantaged, marginalized, and displaced populations around the world are consistently able to produce new kinds of urban space in the midst of escalating global density and homogenization.

The film tonight, GARBAGE DREAMS, is a great example of just such an environment, where the inventiveness and resourcefulness of an underadvantaged population has re-imagined their role in the city. The Zabbaleen, Cairo’s traditional community of garbage collectors, has privatized the trash collection industry in the city, bringing trash into their homes to sort and recycle with staggering efficiency.

For years, they have been an indispensable part of the ecology of urban Cairo. By engaging the downbeat of the cycle of consumption in the city, and embracing a role that is stigmatized by the local population, they have created a unique niche for themselves in the city.

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Stay tuned for video and copies of slides from the event.

Maureen Lunn, Panelist

Andrew Mikhael, Panelist

Toby Lunn, Panelist

AGENCY partners Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller

Nation Building Aesthetics Part I : Fortuitous Disadvantage

2010-01-05T15:00:00.006+01:00

Despite relative geographic advantage and an increasing sense of personal and economic freedom, Albania has failed to capitalize on the potential of its newfound relationship with Europe.

Decades of isolationist doctrine steeped in communist authoritarian rule have yielded to a new era capable of expressing the will of the people, spawning an emerging parliamentary democracy and free market economy. The initial jubilance of post-communist development has suffered, however, quelled within by the manipulation of investors (through pyramid schemes that devastated local capital in the late 1990s) and from abroad by a general negligence in the politics and support of the West.

Once intentionally isolated, Albania now finds itself reluctantly so. Its interests to spawn more direct communication with international politics and world economies encounter obstacles at every turn.

FORTUITOUS DISADVANTAGE
Albania is ranked lowest among European countries in the freedom to trade internationally, and demonstrates the largest discrepancy between actual size of trade sector versus the expected size of trade sector. Miles of coastline, proximity to global market demands, a large working age population, and a sizeable geographical area have done nothing for the strategic economic advantage of the emerging country. The country is still under the shadow of political and economic isolationism.

The will of the populace is far beyond the isolationist methodology, however. As demonstrated by the staggering figures for remittance money sent to Albania from natives working abroad, the country is adapting to its newfound freedom. With a large Albanian diaspora spread throughout Southern and Western Europe, personal finance is already significantly engaging foreign capital.

Albania’s apparent disadvantage, however, can be seen as a unique asset, as it commands the world’s attention because of its very fragility. Where many see flaws, others see opportunity, providing for a uniquely catalytic mixture of local interests with global developmental demands.

Nowhere is the pressure of development in Albania greater than in its capital. Located inland, Tirana is the largest city in the small country. The population of the city has exploded in recent years, tripling from 300,000 to nearly a million inhabitants since 1990. Roughly one third of the country’s population now lives in the capital, and a majority of the new social strata are not native Tiranans.

The city acts as the melting pot of formerly separated peoples, customs, and traditions. Merging an urban culture with the influx from the rural north and south, the city embraces a wide range, providing a common ground for all those seeking opportunity.

The urban strategies of the new city reflect a more general trend in the social climate. The Albanian demographic is a charged mix of a traditional, older, rural population and an urban youth that strives for inclusion in the European schema. The distinction between the two is clearest outside of the city limits, but within the city the boundary is blurred, and the generations coexist to an uncommon degree. Seeking international acceptance and inclusion while maintaining and promoting an established national identity, the city’s position is a mixture of inward and outward focus. Leaning heavily towards establishing international reputation as a priority in a period of intense change, city leaders worked from the outside in, developing the city first for the unstudied glance of an outside observer in the cultivation of image before reconciling its deficiencies for its internal populations.

Global capitalist strategies are sought out and readily assimilated, silently absorbed in a vibrant culture and adaptive economy that seeks its own competitive advancement. But the city seemingly is selling itself, piece by piece, to the global market, convincing the European Union and potential investors worldwide of its ability to cooperate with and productively engage the international community. In the proud originality of its local customs, products, and services, the city, notably, is able to maintain a degree of perceived autonomy relative to other European destinations. It is hard to say that Tirana is the new Athens, the new Istanbul, or the new Madrid. Tirana is the new Tirana, a formerly isolated enclave unveiled to the rest of the world.
Tirana has recently been voted the Most Polluted City in Europe by The Guardian newspaper. With environmental standards relaxed or absent, the city is victim to its own development. Traffic chokes insufficient streets and the city is blanketed by a thick smog.

While the foundation of capitalism in the West started with the enthusiasm of the masses about their freedom of choice, communism embedded its roots by indoctrinating the illusion of freedom of choice. The consequences prove states of similarity: freedom of choice is only real while it agrees with governmental “will”.

With very different beginnings, the architecture of Tirana seems to be steering towards the politics of verticality where the attempt at difference places it deeper into the sea of sameness. The construction boom in the past two decades has catapulted the empty development of architectural typologies towards the representation of a new meaning lacking historical roots in the vernacular. This abrupt development borrowed from foreign trends is impinging on the development of a distinct Albanian architectural culture. Here, the natural course of development, normally based on social evolution, has been bypassed in favor of the attractive superficial western tradition. The resulting architectural environment prescribes an estranged unfamiliar lifestyle that ignores the Albanian individual and his cultural traditions. The people of the city are no longer certain to whom the city belongs.

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This article is excerpted from our illustrated research text entitled Nation Building Aesthetics, avaiable for purchase on Lulu.

POC Environmental Media Part II

2010-01-02T18:46:00.006+01:00

AGENCY projected its digital animations at the "Party of the Century" this New Year's Eve, at the Third Eye Productions event space in Kansas City.

The animations were modeled using the logic of crowd dynamics, inspired by the flocking of birds in this video of 300,000 starlings. At times, our simulation of the swarming crowd takes on the characteristic of a swirling, starlit night sky. At other points, the dancing particles of light evoke windblown snowfall, intermingling groups of fireflies, or streaming explosions of confetti.

The video was projected on the back wall of the event space, creating a dynamic atmosphere for socializing and dancing. We were happy to see several partygoers drawn to the media wall, some even taking group photos in front of the screen. With the projection at one end of the space , and the DJ / dance floor at the other, the event was charged with energy all night.

Special thanks to Jeff Larison for inviting us to display our film, and for organizing the POC.

Check out our photos from the event, and some selected stills from the animations below.

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Urban Agriculture : Ruralizing Kinshasa

2009-12-22T06:00:00.003+01:00

In search of sustenance and without government presence, Kinois are expanding their territories in the form of self-organized agricultural land development.

Using green spaces of the city as food generators rather than for leisurely activities has changed the weave pattern of urban fabric in Kinshasa and other African cities. Any empty lot, dead end street, parks, highway medians are usurped and appropriated from their simply symbolic functions. Spaces that once belonged to the community have been disintegrated to metamorphose into dense enclaves of small parts belonging to individuals. In a city that never rests looking for ways to make ends meet, idle space with manicured lawns and trees is no longer left as such, every corner must produce. This trend has modified the standards by which governments develop cities. The horizontal sprawl and simultaneous greening of open areas has generated a utilitarian organic geometry of layout. Satellite images show the original rectilinear city as designed at the beginning of the twentieth century with proper city blocks and wide streets juxtaposed to the current curvilinear sprawl of homes that wrap around surrounding hills in ever-growing extension towards the green landscape. This constant out-migration from the city center is not only enlarging Kinshasa’s area, it is also inserting small-scale farm pockets in its periphery altering its high density population numbers.
Satellite Image from Google Earth / Urban-Rural Border

To follow this issue, look for additional analysis in our upcoming book Elements of a Tactical Urbanism.

PKN : Hackable Infrastructures

2009-12-17T17:58:00.008+01:00

AGENCY will present its research and design initiatives entitled "Hackable Infrastructures" at Young Architects Forum Pecha Kucha Night on Feb 6, 2010. Details on time and location to follow.

PROJECT BACKGROUND:

The Romani population in Rome is a community in constant crisis. Historically a nomadic, stateless people, the population has largely settled into a semi-permanent, but tenuous relationship with Italian society. Though a large percentage holds Italian citizenship, the Roma (gypsies) are ostracized, undermined, and discriminated against by officials and citizens alike. Once voluntarily transient, the Roma now find themselves reluctantly so, displaced by forced evictions, arson, and acts of violence that have escalated in recent years. Though the average Roman citizen is far more mobile socially, economically, and physically than the average Romani, the “constant movement” of the Roma is seen as a threat to stability throughout metropolitan Rome.

PROJECT PROPOSALS:

Three project proposals envision infrastructural and architectural frameworks that enable the preservation and co-habitation of Roma and Roman culture. Providing a “hackable infrastructure” that enables both populations to adapt to the changing needs of the contemporary city, the projects redefine the role of the architect and city planner. Absolving designers of the burden to impose a uniform image of urbanity for populations that cannot fulfill its expectations, these “tactical urbanisms” proposed allow instead for multiple images of the city to emerge-where the built environment is responsive and representative of the people it serves, and the global economy of which it is a part.

Film Screening and Panel Discussion

2009-12-15T18:00:00.011+01:00

INFORMAL URBANISMS:
THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD
La Esquina Gallery, 1000 West 25th Street, Kansas City, MO.
January 6th 2010, 6:30pm
Donations Welcome

AGENCY will host and moderate a panel discussion concerning emerging conditions in disadvantaged and marginalized urban populations around the world. AGENCY will present its recent architectural and infrastructural proposals, and screen Garbage Dreams, a feature-length documentary following the Zaballeen, Cairo's traditional trash collectors, also known as "garbage people".

(10% of proceeds from Garbage Dreams’ Tour will go the The Spirit of Youth Association, a non-governmental organization of Zaballeen, that runs The Recycling School profiled in Garbage Dreams.)

Find out more about the film at www.garbagedreams.com

POC Environmental Media Part I

2009-12-05T18:00:00.007+01:00

AGENCY will provide environmental media for the "Party of the Century", hosted by Jeff Larison this New Year's Eve in Kansas City, MO. Stay tuned for updates and screenshots from our animations and films.
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Commuter City

2009-12-01T18:00:00.005+01:00

AGENCY will be contributing an ongoing feature on architecture and urbanism to the new online news source, KC Free Press. Look for our analysis in the weeks ahead.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Over the last 75 years, Kansas City has transformed from a dense, walkable, urban fabric to one that focuses on the ease of commute and commerce afforded by the automobile and its various urban proxies. Parking decks, garages, and surface lots are matched only by lanes of limited access highway in providing a recognizable image of the city. Historic landmarks, office buildings, and notable centers of exchange and commerce have slowly given way to the needs of the car and the exurban commuter, demolished to provide space to house the increasing number of cars visiting the city each day.

While the slow degradation of Kansas City’s urban core is nothing new to the American city, here it is hyperbolically intertwined with the history and future of automobile culture, creating truly unique forms of urban interaction unforeseen by the planners of pedestrian cities centuries ago.

Elements of a Tactical Urbanism

2009-11-15T18:00:00.004+01:00

AGENCY has completed research and project proposals for their upcoming book, entitled "Elements of a Tactical Urbanism."

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Throughout the modernizing world there are marginalized populations, displaced by the rapidly expanding, productive circles of industrialized, and globalized society. Refugee camps, nomadic populations, social housing blocks, shanty towns, and entire cities in developing nations, invent ways to construct informal environments that operate outside the legal, political, and societal frameworks that have otherwise ignored them. Demonstrating a unique ability to turn apparently overwhelming disadvantage into a unique combination of self-expression, subversion, and subterfuge, these neglected social enclaves can provide an alternative to the historically failed models of explicit urban planning.

Elements of a Tactical Urbanism compiles analytical research in architecture and urbanism with design proposals for the contemporary city. Cataloguing the successful tactics of communities throughout the developing world, and extrapolating them for use in urban and infrastructural designs, the collection outlines a clear agenda for the contemporary architect.

Absolving architectural designers and urban planners of the burden to impose a uniform image of urbanity for populations that do not share the same dream, and cannot fulfill its expectations, these strategies instead allow for multiple images of the city to emerge – where the built environment is responsive and representative of the people it serves, and the global economy of which it is part.

Export Identity

2009-11-10T18:59:00.016+01:00

The United Arab Emirates embodies the post-national problematic in it most intense and paradoxical forms. Having established itself as a the center of global capital exchange, commerce, and communication, and increasingly opening its borders to foreign investment and labor, it is constantly faced with an identity crisis on a widening scale.

Local Emirati are a minority of the population, yet they are by far the most visible population of this increasingly “decentered multiplicity”. They are the wealthy and middle class citizens for whom the iconic skyscrapers and model communities are built. They are the voice and face of the region, and its representatives, but they are far from being the core.

The built identity of the urban core is in crisis. With the rapid development of the coastal city-states, the traditional culture of the Emirati is being subsumed by a glittery culture of commerce, evidenced equally in the conflation of spectacle in themed shopping experiences, and commercialized theme parks. The traditional artifices are absorbed by new modes of social and commercial interchange, while traditional values permeate the new societal and economic structure.
Industrial City Abu Dhabi, aerial image

To follow this issue, look for additional analysis in our upcoming book Elements of a Tactical Urbanism.

Cultures of Waste

2009-11-03T03:25:00.022+01:00

On the edge of Cairo stand two communities unique in their ability to convert the by-products of consumption and destruction into a self-sustaining urban ecology. In Manshiyat Naser, known also as “Garbage Mountain”, a community is mobilized, sorting and recycling Cairo’s waste with such efficiency as to render multinational waste management corporations speechless. In Qarafa, the “City of the Dead”, a vast 4-mile long cemetery is re-purposed as an informal housing settlement, the very fabric of death coerced into creating inhabitable environments and furniture for Cairo’s poor. Both communities belie a great necessity for the material surpluses of the contemporary city to be re-imagined, not as de facto waste, but as generative material for the use of future generations. The sheer magnitude of this condition in Cairo has accelerated the development of these two similar strategies for an urban re-cycling, creating vital communities that engage the downbeats of the metropolitan lifecycle.

Informal Settlements (Red) vs. Formal Settlements (Orange) in urban Cairo.

To follow this issue, look for additional analysis in our upcoming book Elements of a Tactical Urbanism.

Sites of Nowhere

2009-09-08T19:42:00.013+02:00

The refugee camp epitomizes the global divide between a voluntarily mobile global elite and a reluctantly mobilized local population. Displaced by war, persecution, or natural disaster, the refugee is forced away from home, abandoning any trace of individual or social identity to endeavor on a search to desperately reclaim them both. Houses, villages, and entire cities throughout the world are left deserted, their population dispersed as if by magnetic repulsion to the far reaches of their country or continent, wherever ‘safety’ and ‘security’ might once again be thought possible. “Home”, or “homeland” is reconceived in the refugee’s mind, not by what it was, but what it is not, the absence and loss providing the only sense of identification and cohesion in a new life defined mainly by that which it lacks.

Recent developments in the Somali crisis have placed enormous pressures on refugee camps in Dadaab, Kenya, currently the world’s largest population of refugees. With 6,500 new arrivals each month, these camps have exceeded their target population by almost 300 percent, housing 290,000 displaced persons in facilities originally designed to sustain 90,000, and the numbers continue to grow. This humanitarian emergency has prompted UN officials to transport almost 13,000 of the Dadaab residents to another camp in Kakuma, Kenya.

The camp can be seen not as a site of suspected stability, but one of continual instability, dependent on and responsive to the conditions of neighboring cities, nations, and other camps. Where the camps might act as a “release valve” for the pressures of the formalized world, the only outlet for pressures within the camps are in the network of camps themselves, either through extension, relocation, or destruction of the existing camp infrastructure.

[Dadaab Layout and Population. © A G E N C Y ]

[Dagahaley Camp / Dadaab. Satellite Image © Digital Globe]
[Ifo Camp / N-Zero / Dadaab. Image © UNHCR.]

To follow this issue, look for additional analysis in our upcoming book Elements of a Tactical Urbanism.

Informal Urbanisms

2009-09-04T22:33:00.016+02:00

AGENCY has been awarded a residency fellowship at The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. They will be working on compiling an analytical research text entitled Informal Urbanisms. Stay tuned to AGENCY's blog for updates and case studies.

Project Description:
Throughout the modernizing world there are marginalized populations, displaced by the rapidly expanding, productive circles of industrialized, and globalized society. Refugee camps, nomadic populations, social housing blocks, shanty towns, and entire cities in developing nations, invent ways to construct informal environments that operate outside the legal, political, and societal frameworks that have otherwise ignored them. Demonstrating a unique ability to turn apparently overwhelming disadvantage into a unique combination of self-expression, subversion, and subterfuge, these neglected social enclaves can provide an alternative to the historically failed models of explicit urban planning.

We propose to compile an illustrated research text outlining our interpretation of these improvisational environments. By investigating the physical and perceptual constructions of these fortuitously disadvantaged urban assemblies, we hope to outline a new model of “bottom-up” infrastructural and architectural development, producing a catalog of self-organizing developmental techniques in direct contrast to the failed and failing insistence on “top-down” utopian prescriptions of modernist planners past and present.

Absolving architectural designers and urban planners of the burden to impose a uniform image of urbanity for populations that do not share the same dream, and cannot fulfill its expectations, these strategies instead allow for multiple images of the city to emerge – where the built environment is responsive and representative of the people it serves, and the global economy of which it is part.

[Refugee Camp Distribution v. Population Density in SubSaharan Africa. © A G E N C Y]

Nation Building Aesthetics

2009-09-04T22:15:00.021+02:00

Nation Building Aesthetics is now available for purchase on Lulu.

Nation Building Aesthetics is a research and analytical text exploring the recent urban and architectural history of Tirana, an emerging world capital in the rapidly developing nation of Albania. Drawing on first-hand experience of the urban environment and personal interviews with its residents and advocates, the project documents the unique potential and paradox of a city absorbed in fhe fabrication of image. Detailing the unique logic of the city’s mayor, Edi Rama, as a radical form of superficial urbanism, the text and graphic analysis outlines the incredible resourcefulness and ingenuity of a novel model of low-investment, high-return urban policy, and the resulting dramatic reversal of the psychological and social constructs of the city’s inhabitants. Speculating on methods of extrapolating these logics to increasing scales of local efficacy and global interaction, the project proposes new futures for Albania, a nation uniquely positioned to redefine itself on the world stage.

[Tirana Urban Redevelopment. Photograph © A G E N C Y]

A G E N C Y at Storefront

2008-06-01T18:00:00.007+02:00

AGENCY's entry to White House Redux Competition will be displayed at Storefront for Art and Architecture. The entry, entitled Terminal Paroxysm, proposes a real-time interactive monument for the new presidency.

Unsolicited Architecture

2008-02-01T18:00:00.004+01:00

AGENCY has published their nation building strategies for the underadvantaged nation of Albania in Volume 14: Unsolicited Architecture. (Volume is a joint project of Archis, AMO, and C-LAB)

Inhabited Displacement

2006-01-01T18:00:00.008+01:00

AGENCY's urban design and interactive media proposal for downtown St. Louis has won honorable mention in the St. Louis Follies Competition sponsored by AIA-St. Louis. The design proposes a progressively inhabited infrastructural framework responsive to the dynamic flows of populations and information both locally and abroad.

FILM

2005-01-01T18:00:00.052+01:00

LIST OF PROJECTS

2010
30S

2009
Environmental Media 2009 MORE >

2008
Environmental Media 2008

VIEW ALL POSTS RELATED TO FILM >

ARCHITECTURE

2005-01-01T18:00:00.051+01:00

LIST OF PROJECTS

2010
Super Levee Urban Farm MORE >

2009
Artist Residence
Sound Barrier Housing
Water Filtration Bridge
Agri-Collector

2008
Core House
White House Redux : Terminal Paroxysm /A Real-Time Interactive Monument MORE >

2007
Street Decay Index
Recycle Tourism
HyrdoPotential

2006
Urban Wetland / Inhabited Displacement MORE >

PHOTOGRAPHY

2005-01-01T18:00:00.048+01:00

LIST OF PROJECTS

2009

2008
Microcosmic Nature

2007

2006
Space Inscribed

RESEARCH

2005-01-01T18:00:00.046+01:00

LIST OF PROJECTS

2010
Commuter City
MORE >

2009
Informal Urbanisms MORE >

2007
Nation Building Aesthetics MORE >

2006
Reading Backwards : An Architectural Interrogation of Political History in Tirana

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

2005-01-01T06:00:00.060+01:00

Books by AGENCY / Ersela Kripa + Stephen Mueller:

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. Elements of a Tactical Urbanism. Forthcoming.

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. Nation Building Aesthetics. New York : AGENCY (self-published). 2009. PURCHASE BOOK >

Books featuring work by AGENCY / Ersela Kripa + Stephen Mueller:
eme3 2010 | International Architecture Festival Exhibition Catalog. Barcelona, CCCB / MACBA: 2010

UNPLANNED | Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale,"Hackable Infrastructures".USA: Superfront LA, 2010. p26-33

White House Redux | 123 Ideas for a New White House, “Terminal Paroxysm”. New York: Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2008.

Articles in Journals by AGENCY / Ersela Kripa + Stephen Mueller:

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Commuter City : Introduction.” KC Free Press. Jan 7, 2010.
- Urban analysis of automobile culture in Kansas City for recurring feature in online publication

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Transient Space.” KC Free Press. Jan 7, 2010.

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. "Losing the Edge." KC Free Press. Jan 20, 2010.

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Urban Metabolism.” KC Free Press. Jan 27, 2010.

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Underground Society.” KC Free Press. Feb 4, 2010.

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Upward Mobility.” KC Free Press. Feb 11, 2010.

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Peripheral Entropy.” KC Free Press. Feb 18, 2010.

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Passing Through.” KC Free Press. Feb 25, 2010.

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Drive Up / Drive Out.” KC Free Press. Mar 4, 2010.

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “12th Street Rag.” KC Free Press. Mar 12, 2010.

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “The Great Divide.” KC Free Press. Mar 18, 2010.

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Lasting Impermanence.” KC Free Press. Mar 25, 2010.

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Readings from the Community Bookshelf.” KC Free Press. Apr 1, 2010.

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Digging Deep” KC Free Press. April 8, 2010.
Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Out of Bounds” KC Free Press. April 15, 2010.
Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Show-Me Modern” KC Free Press. April 21, 2010.
Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Over the Top” KC Free Press. April 28, 2010.

Kripa, Ersela and Stephen Mueller. “Nation Building Aesthetics”. Volume. No. 14: Unsolicited Architecture. Archis / AMO / C-LAB: 2008.
- Excerpt from research and design proposal for the nation of Albania.

Articles on Work of AGENCY / Ersela Kripa + Stephen Mueller:

Wetzel, Lucas. "Informal Urbanisms". KC Free Press. January 5, 2010.

Sterchi, Laura. "Garbage Dreams, Informal Urbanisms". Green Dream Living (weblog). January 7, 2010.

CONTACT

2005-01-01T06:00:00.059+01:00

EMAIL
agency [at] agencyarchitecture.com

WEB
www.agencyarchitecture.com [coming soon]

PHONE
+39 06 5846 263

MAIL
Ersela Kripa + Stephen Mueller
Fellows in Architecture 2010-2011
American Academy in Rome
Via Angelo Masina 5
00153 Roma ITALIA

Selected Awards

2005-01-01T06:00:00.058+01:00

Rome Prize in Architecture 2010-2011
Awarded to Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller
The American Academy in Rome awards the prestigious Rome Prize to a selected group of artists and scholars invited to Rome to pursue their creative goals in an atmosphere conducive to artistic innovation and progressive scholarship. Awarded for research and design project entitled "Hackable Infrastructures : Inhabiting the Margins of Contemporary Rome".

One Prize
Awarded to Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller / AGENCY Architecture LLC
AGENCY's proposal for a new brand of coastal ecological infrastructure, entitled Super Levee Urban Farm, was selected as one of two co-winners, from a field of 202 teams from over 20 countries.The competition, sponsored by Terreform 1, called for technical, urbanistic, and architectural strategies not simply for the food production required to feed the cities and suburbs, but the possibilities of diet, agriculture, and retrofitted facilities that could achieve that level within the constraints of the local climate and conditions.

NYFA Artists Fellowship 2010
Awarded to Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller
Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller are 2010 Fellows in Architecture / Environmental Structures from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

MacDowell Colony Fellows in Residence
Awarded to Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller
Recipient of highly selective fellowship, for “creative individuals to produce works of enduring imagination.” For proposal entitled “Informal Urbanisms”, an architectural research text and design proposal investigating the ability of marginalized populations to transform apparently overwhelming disadvantage into novel forms of urban culture.

White House Redux
Design for a real-time interactive national monument and urban event space entitled “Terminal Paroxysm”. Entry placed 14th out of more than 500 entries in popular vote in an international ideas competition for a new White House.(Control Group, Storefront for Art and Architecture)

Saint Louis Follies Ideas Competition, Honorable Mention
Proposal for Saint Louis Gateway Forum, entitled Inhabited Displacement , for progressively inhabited infrastructural framework, urban programming, and interactive, networked media design.
William Kinne Travel Fellowship
Awarded to Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller
Traveling fellowship for independent research of architectural, artistic, and urban development strategies in developing countries. Research text and graphic analysis entitled Reading Backwards : An Architectural Interrogation of Political History in Tirana.

ABOUT

2005-01-01T06:00:00.038+01:00

FIRM PROFILE
AGENCY is a research and design practice established by Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller in New York City. By drawing on a wide range of design technologies and research initiatives, the practice hopes to redefine the role of the architect and designer in an increasingly urbanized, and globalized world. Designers must embrace society’s changing needs if they are to remain a vital and significant part of cultural production. Students and practitioners must master not only the traditional spatial, aesthetic, and organizational skills long attributed to architectural endeavor, but become increasingly savvy in societal structures, political policies, and ethical practices, in order to address the needs of a rapidly changing world.

AGENCY engages contemporary global culture through a range of commissioned architectural projects, speculative proposals, urban research, film, and photography. In each project we strive to identify and capitalize on what makes each client, site, or social context truly unique, taking advantage of circumstance to propose new modes of living.

ERSELA KRIPA, RA
Ersela Kripa is a licensed architect and founding partner of AGENCY. Ersela holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University, and a Bachelor of Architecture from New Jersey Institute of Technology.

STEPHEN MUELLER
Stephen Mueller is an architectural designer and founding partner of AGENCY. Stephen holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Kansas.