The interest in innovative design in New York City, which has allowed a number of the world’s most famous architects to win residential building commissions, is helping starchitects’ assistants too. In part, the price premium that famous designers can command (see Apartment buildings as canvases) has allowed their younger, cheaper trainees to win their own projects.
Leading the generational shift are architects like Dan Wood and Amale Andraos of Work AC (who both worked for Rem Koolhaas), Markus Dochantschi at Studio MDA (who worked for Zaha Hadid) and G Tects’ Gordon Kipping (who worked for Frank Gehry). All are in their thirties or early forties.
These newbie architects are winning private and public commissions. For instance, Studio MDA, whose chief, Dochantschi, managed Hadid’s office in London, has several projects on the go, including an art gallery beneath Manhattan’s High Line. In Brooklyn, the firm has co-designed the BAM Brooklyn Arts Tower (with Germany’s Behnisch Architects). In addition, Studio MDA is the co-developer of the $85 million tower to be built in Fort Greene adjacent to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The tower, expected to be completed in 2010, will rise 36 floors on the north side and 30 floors on the south side.
It will feature 187 units of mid-income housing, with retail space and a dance center at the base.
Dochantschi said that compelling design, not just big-name recognition, is allowing relative unknowns opportunities to shape big public-private projects.
“Right now, and I would give a lot of credit to Bloomberg for this, there is a big understanding from developers and clients that design will be a criterion to getting certain approvals,” he said.
The young designers said the experience of managing and designing their mentors’ big-budget projects has given them the confidence to build their own businesses.
They said they are earning business the way architects always have: through referrals and relationships.
“We can’t charge as much as famous architects because we’re not established yet,” said David Salazar, a partner at Studio MDA.
Wood and Andraos came from Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture to open Work AC in 2002: they designed Diane von Furstenburg’s headquarters, which opened last year on 14th Street at the edge of the Meatpacking District.
They agreed that the fame of architects like Gehry and Koolhaas—innovative practitioners as well as theoreticians—has heightened clients’ range of expectations.
“Architectural knowledge has gotten a big boost in the past few years,” said Wood. “A lot of our friends and contemporaries are pushing ideas in practice rather than doing primarily academic work.”
Kipping, meanwhile, has designed a new tower for Baruch College’s campus at 23rd and Lexington.
“What we do doesn’t look like what Gehry does,” said Kipping, who recently redesigned Delano Village, an 1,800-unit complex in Harlem. “So they’re not getting a junior Gehry. But there are similarities in an attitude of servicing a client that I’ve learned over the years from him.”
The city’s insistence on expressive design in big projects, and developers’ awareness that distinctive architecture can command a price premium, may even mean that architecture’s star system is moving into a new phase.
“In New York, having buildings from international stars like Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron or Jean Nouvel is very new,” said Salazar. “What I see as a potential logical progression is that now that this kind of design has happened, young firms could find the playing field level a bit.”
When it does, architects who worked for the legends may have a running start.