|

Photo: arcspace

American
Folk Art Museum
Tod Williams
1943 Detroit, MI
Bachelor of Arts, Princeton University, 1965
Master of Fine Arts, Princeton University, 1967
Billie Tsien
1949 Ithaca, NY
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Yale University, 1971
Master in Architecture, UCLA, 1977
The work of Tod Williams Billie Tsien and Associates
bridges across different worlds - across theory and practice; across
architecture and the fine arts. Williams has a seasoned foundation
in the practice of architecture beginning with over six years as an
associate in the office of Richard Meier before starting his own practice.
Tsien brings to architecture a background in the Fine Arts and a keen
interest in crossing disciplinary boundaries. Together, Williams and
Tsien have produced works with artists such as Jackie Ferrara, Mary Miss
and Elyn Zimmerman. For the Elisa Monte Dance Company, they designed
sets and costumes. Sponsored by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,
they produced a provocative traveling exhibition installation titled
"Domestic Arrangements: A Lab Report" (1989-1990), that explored
how the issues of social idealism and aesthetic discipline that formed the
early Modern Movement might still have relevance in a contemporary
context. They have designed traveling shows for the Noguchi
Foundation and have made a masterplan for the Noguchi Museum in Long
Island City. They have designed the permanent installation of the
Museum of the Chinese in the Americas.
Their built work, bordering on minimalism, pays
careful attention to context, to detail and to the subtleties of a subdued
but rich materiality. Feinberg Hall at Princeton (1986) is a
skillfully developed dormitory tower that unites contextually the Gothic
campus and some rather undistinguished buildings from the 1960's. It
was noted by Time magazine in the year end issue as one of the best
designs of the year, and was an AIA National Honor Award winner.
Also cited in another Time magazine year-end issue and by the AIA National
Interior Awards jury was a Pool House featuring a 70 foot long painting by
Sol LeWitt. In a larger academic context, the New College at the
University of Virginia (with VMDO, 1992) radically reinterprets the
Jeffersonian rationalism governing the historic campus by arranging a
series of splayed finger-like slabs across the sloping site.
The Phoenix Art Museum, completed in 1996 is the
heart of the cultural community of Phoenix. A 50,000 sq. ft.
addition and a 150,000 sq. ft renovation, this city bond funded project
won an honor award from the Arizona AIA and has been widely published.
Since its completion, museum attendance has increased fourfold and we are
currently designing a new addition.
The Neurosciences Institute, completed in 1995,
incorporates laboratories, a theoretical studies building and a chamber
music auditorium, all aspects of this project including furniture and
landscape were designed by the studio. This project was termed a
"magnificent piece of work" by New York Times Architecture
critic, Herbert Muschamp, and was cited by Time magazine as one of the
best designs of '96. The Neurosciences Institute has been widely
published, and has received a number of awards, including an AIA National
Honor Award.
The Cranbrook Natatorium, completed in the fall of
1999 is a building for a competitive swimming pool on the Eliel Saarinen
designed campus of the Cranbrook School in Michigan. The Natatorium has
been designed in concert with the natural conditions and the landscape.
This building breathes with the environment through twenty foot tall
wooden louver doors and two thirty foot oculi which open to the sky. This
project was awarded a National AIA Award.
The Mattin Art Center, a new 55,000 square foot
student arts building opened at Johns Hopkins University in 2001.
This complex was built to address student life. A combination of a
student center and a facility for student directed arts activities, the
Mattin Center holds a café, a black box theater, art studios, digital art
studios, dance practice rooms and music practice rooms.
Current projects include a bio-engineering building
at the University of Pennsylvania, an East Asian Library at the University
of California at Berkeley, and a conference center for the Wood’s Hole
Oceanographic Institute.
Both architects maintain active teaching careers
parallel to their practice. They have taught at Parsons School of
Design, SCI-ARC, Harvard, Yale, University of Texas at Austin, and the
Cooper Union. They have shared the Louis I. Kahn chair at Yale
University School of Architecture. Billie Tsien is on the boards of the
Architectural League, the Public Art Fund, the American Academy in Rome
and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Tod Williams is on
the advisory board of the School of Architecture at Princeton.
|