WEISS/MANFREDI

Weiss/Manfredi is at the forefront of architectural design practices that are redefining the relationships between landscape, architecture, infrastructure, and art. The firm’s projects are noted for clarity of vision, bold and iconic forms, and material innovation.
Weiss/Manfredi received the Academy Award in Architecture, an award given annually by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, acknowledging the unique vision of the firm. They were also named one of North America’s “Emerging Voices” by the Architectural League of New York and the firm won the New York City AIA Gold Medal of Honor.
The firm’s Olympic Sculpture Park for the Seattle Art Museum was a winner of an international competition and was recently recognized as the Nature category winner at the World Architecture Festival and Best in Category by the I.D. Magazine Environments Design Awards. The project won a Progressive Architecture Award, multiple AIA Awards, an ASLA Honor Award, the EDRA Places Award, and was the first North American project to be awarded Harvard University’s International Veronica Green Prize in Urban Design.
The Diana Center, a new multi-use arts building at Barnard College, recently opened to students and the public. Winner of a national design competition and a Progressive Architecture Award, the center establishes a new nexus for social, cultural and intellectual life for the campus and city. Other built works include the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, New York, the Smith College Campus Center in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the competition-winning Women’s Memorial and Education Center at Arlington National Cemetery, which won a federal design award, a national AIA Honor Award, and an I.D. Magazine Environments Award.

Weiss/Manfredi recently won the international competition to design the Taekwondo Park in Muju, Korea, and is working on a new campus for Aga Khan University in East Africa. Other current projects include the Hunters Point South Park, a waterfront park on the East River in Queens, New York; the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center; and the Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Weiss/Manfredi’s urban design projects include the New York Olympics rowing venues, featured in both the Sao Paolo International Biennial and Van Alen’s Open exhibition. Wandering Ecologies, a design proposal for Toronto’s Lower Don Lands, recently won the American Architecture Award and an AIA New York Merit Award. Urban planning studies include the redesign of New York City’s Columbus Circle, commissioned by the Municipal Arts Society, and a Brooklyn Bridge Master Plan to develop design strategies for lower Manhattan areas affected by the events of September 11th.

Publications featuring their work include Architecture, Metropolis, Architectural Record, Architectural Review, A+T, Lotus, Space, Landscape World, Topos, Detail, Domus, L’Arca, C-3 Korea, GA Document, Praxis, Landscape Architecture, I.D. Magazine, Time, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Their work has also been presented in numerous books including The Sex of Architecture, Art Spaces, Constructed Living Systems, Materials for Sustainable Sites, Architecture & Design, The Fractured Metropolis, Value in Art, and Design Culture Now.

Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi have taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, Cornell University, and Princeton University, and have lectured at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Rice, and Princeton Universities, CCAC San Francisco, Portugal’s Architectural League, Essen Germany’s Design Center, the Modern Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Chicago Athenaeum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Louvre Museum in Paris. Marion Weiss is the Graham Chair Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania where she has taught since 1991. Michael Manfredi was a founding board member for the Van Alen Institute and is currently a board member for the Storefront for Art and Architecture.

Weiss/Manfredi’s work has been exhibited internationally including the “Groundswell” show at the Museum of Modern Art. Their work has also been exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the National Building Museum, Max Protetch Gallery, Harvard University, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, the Van Alen Institute, the Architectural League of New York, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Essen Germany Design Center, the Sao Paolo International Biennial, the European Landscape Biennial, and the Venice Architecture Biennale.

The recent monograph Surface/Subsurface, published in January 2008, features cross-disciplinary projects in master planning, urban design, landscape, and architecture.

For us the territory of architecture should concern itself with the whole of the built environment. Heightened disciplinary distinctions between architecture, art, landscape architecture, engineering, and urban planning marginalize the status of the architectural project, precluding new paradigms for contemporary settings.

Our collaboration was initiated by a desire to question such a limited view. Instead, we search for opportunities to consider, both in physical and disciplinary terms, a larger territory for expression.

We regard the existing site as an architectural condition already rich in possibilities. Superimposing new programs on a site can bring into focus that which is unseen, creating opportunities for invention, transformation and use.

We design to clarify the physical and cultural identity of each project, opportunistically integrating multiple disciplines and alternative methodologies to create meaningful settings. Movement, light and materiality heighten perception and experience and are envisioned as active participants in shaping architecture.

These convictions have been important provocations in the design of our work. Each project, regardless of scale, is a fertile site to test the capacity of a broader definition of design, envisioning a critical practice that is an active instrument in shaping contemporary culture.

Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi
Weiss/Manfredi