New Affiliates (Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb)
The history of exhibiting art has a long-standing relationship with domestic space from upscale salons to the apartment gallery, where one was accustomed to discerning between art and everyday objects, moldings and reliefs, and in rooms of various sizes, lighting conditions and decorative styles. This relationship commingled the informal with the formal, the personal with the public, the intimate with the spectacular — creating an interwoven relationship between audience and home, art and the private interior.
We will discuss that intersection of art and domesticity, especially as it pertains to a hybrid condition that we have come across in our own work. We will look at three consecutive exhibitions designed for the Jewish Museum of New York, itself embedded in a 1908 mansion designed by Cass Gilbert. Now simultaneously a home and an institution, the building is partly preserved (to maintain the distinct ornate features of each room-baptized-gallery), partly appropriated (to envelop white-box-like galleries) and regularly subjected to reappropriation between distinct shows. We’ll take a closer look at the tactics behind its perpetual state of transition and change, of its endless “remuddling,” to borrow a description from Lewis Mumford.
New Affiliates (www.new-affiliates.us) is an award-winning New York-based design practice led by Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb. They innovate through building, experimenting with forms and materials to blur the lines between volume, structure, decoration and surface. Their work focuses on matters of reuse within a context of material excess, particularly as it relates to current standards of practice. They have completed a range of work from interiors to ground-up projects alongside a series of collaborations with institutions including New York’s Jewish Museum, the Shed and the Canadian Center for Architecture. They have exhibited in venues from Storefront for Art and Architecture to the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Onassis Cultural Center, and their work has been published in numerous design magazines internationally.
Ivi Diamantopoulou is a licensed architect in Europe and an AIA International Associate with over a decade of experience in designing and realizing built work. Prior to co-founding New Affiliates, she worked in Europe and the United States, most recently as an associate at MOS Architects in New York City. Alongside practice, she frequently teaches design, history and theory of architecture. She holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton, where she was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize for excellence in design and the Stanley J. Seeger fellowship, and a diploma with honors in architecture and engineering from the University of Patras in Greece.
Prior to founding New Affiliates, Jaffer Kolb worked as a designer in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles for a range of international studios. He teaches architecture around New York and was the 2015 Muschenheim Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College. Previously he worked on the 13th Venice Architecture Biennial under David Chipperfield and before that was the U.S. editor for the Architectural Review. He holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University, a Master of Urban Planning from the London School of Economics and a Bachelor of Arts in film studies from Wesleyan University.
Image: Elevation Oblique: A time-lapse drawing of the Jewish Museum in New York City, featuring interiors of the original Warburg family home, the museum’s administrative functions and a series of exhibitions over time.
