inworkshop’s principal Idan Naor provided research and drawing assistance for Petrochemical America in collaboration with Kate Orff (SCAPE Landscape Architecture PLLC) and Richard Misrach. Learn more.
inworkshop’s principal Idan Naor was a team member in collaboration with SCAPE Landscape Architecture PLLC on the Studio Gang team. The work was exhibited at the MoMA as part of an effort to "rethink the physical and financial architecture of living, working, and commuting in the extended metropolis." Learn more.
In commemoration of the 200th year anniversary of the Commissioners Plan for New York, this competition charette considers the Manhattan grid with both its familiar and appurtenant spaces.
The logic of the Manhattan grid answers to the forces of rational organization, urban planning, and economics on construction and development. Within this logic exists a secondary system. A less rationalized organization filled with voids and residues found behind and in between buildings, that together can compose a series of discontinuous events and environments. The consequences of zoning laws, building code regulations, abandoned lots and demolished buildings, together yield a hidden series of spaces.
This secondary system is the alter ego of rigid rational organization. LAPS imagines these tertiary spaces injected with programmatic interventions to enable a less restricted connectivity. The new rhyzomatic matrix is one in which to get lost. Pockets of space become magnetic nuclei for programmatic events: a lap pool, a secret garden, a farmer's market, anything! Each nucleus affords evolving opportunities for a space reclaimed by contemporary contexts while leaving room for adaptation in the future.
Year: 2011
Location: New York, NY
Team: Idan Naor with William Feuerman, Endria Audisho (Office Feuerman), Sheryl Kasak (Interim Design)
Type: Competition entry
Concept design for a home in Nicaragua. With a top-road approach, plinth house nestles into the landscape and affords a multi-use platform.
Plinth house employs strategic solar orientation vis-à-vis its thermal mass and passive ventilation strategies. Additionally, the plinth is slightly pitched — a move that facilitates water drainage but more importantly, it functions as an oblique to activate program on the massive plane. With a nod to Paul Virilio’s theory of the oblique, plinth house is a force of disequilibrium that encourages movement and the body’s physical experience of space. The gargantuan oblique provides blank canvas for action, contemplative practice, and various programs the client is involved with including hosting professional wellness workshops and yoga retreats.
Team: Idan Naor, Daniel Stone
XS vs Excess is part of an ongoing investigation on Contemporary Received Ideas in Architecture led by Enrique Walker at Columbia University. Working through a series of self-imposed constraints (defined by observed clichés) allows for an innovative and surprising design solution. This project attempts to misread and outwit two contemporary architectural clichés. The first is "Outerwear": a facade meant to appear as structural but is in fact ornamental. The second trope is the "Porcupine": a hairy or fuzzy volume. These two common formal clichés are researched and the means of reproducing them are established with precise rules and regulations (akin to an Ikea manual for recreating the clichés). These prescriptions set the scaffolding of constraints through which we operate (akin to building codes, client wishes, zoning regulations, etc.), and this is a point of departure to reinvent, through structure and organization, a cultural institution in Midtown Manhattan.
The proposal raises a series of questions regarding the role of a contemporary cultural institution and its relationship to the city. The proposal provides for two alternate solutions: XS (extra small) versus Excess (extra large).
Excess inherits the cliché of the Porcupine to generate an excessive container to house a variety of organizations suspended form the spikes of the hairy envelope.
XS inherits the cliché of the Outerwear to develop a series of restrained slot buildings where the program is atomized and distributed in order to be re-linked through a bridging strategy.
In XS vs Excess, the cultural institution is designed to simultaneously house a Museum, Library, Artist Residence and offices. The Porcupine inserts a massive infrastructure that utilizes a post-tensioned cable system to give maximum organizational flexibility for the three different programs that will be hosted within the cultural institution. This subverts the cliché of the decorative spikes into an integral structural system and performative elements.
The Outerwear transforms the received idea of an ornamental envelope into an operative structural system in anticipation of the 'next' building - thus conceiving every Outerwear as another building. Both facets of the same project were designed to seamlessly allow for the public to flow into the building from the street. In the case of Outerwear, the site is carved out to provide a continuous oblique public space, while the Porcupine provides a public plaza that plugs directly to a subway station below by elevating the envelope and liberating the ground plane.
Year: 2012
Location: New York, NY
Team: Idan Naor with Emanuel Admassu, Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Eduardo Rega Calvo, Enrique Walker (critic)
Type: speculation
Digital fabrication is the medium of exploration, research and speculation regarding the relationship between point, line, and surface.
The line follows a path defined by its host surface. When examined in two dimensions, the line affords an understanding of the torque within a three-dimensional surface (that is, a 2D diagram of a 3D surface). In three dimensions, the line enhances a reading of the surface, as visible in the cast concrete sample.
Year: 2011
Location: New York, NY
Team: Idan Naor with Juan Francisco Saldarriaga, Jennifer Chang, Aaron Berman
Type: research speculation
“On Monday, April 22 [2019], the city council approved the Climate Mobilization Act, a package of bills and resolutions designed to drastically improve the energy efficiency of New York City. Buildings are front and center to this "New Green Deal" for New York, with green roofs taking the spotlight.” READ THE RECENT DWELL ARTICLE HERE
Beyond providing quality outdoor space, this green roof also reduces building energy usage and costs, mitigates storm water runoff, improves air quality, decreases carbon emission, and encourages urban biodiversity (pollinators!). And it smells nice.
Type: Green Roof, Sustainability
Location: Brooklyn
Team: Naor Suzumori Architecture D.P.C.
Size: approx. 2,400 sf
In the past couple of years we have lived through a global pandemic, witnessing the world shift and reorganize work and life structures. This project is a small conversion of a bathroom into a home office, but it is being recorded as a relic, emblematic of this moment in our history.
Carved out of an abandoned quarry, this retreat is cloistered away from phone and radio signals. Visual corridors reinforce connections between visitors. Contemplative practices are encouraged by spaces that allow residents to be alone together.