INTERVAL PROJECTS

“YOU CAN ONLY SHIFT the profession by being unprofessional,” laughs Marlisa Wise. Indeed, Interval Projects, the practice she co-founded with Benedict Clouette, is advancing the field of architecture. The pair have designed residences, health clinics, and offices since 2016, but it’s Interval Projects’s long-term work with activist and advocacy groups, and its aptitude for publicfacing design proposals, that distinguishes its approach. The pair also boast a design ethos that challenges traditional approaches to architectural problem-solving.

The duo has been involved in a number of adaptive reuse projects focused on creating access to vacant public land. The first is Dutch Kills Loop, a landscape above an abandoned rail line in Long Island City, Queens. Wise and Clouette were hired by a public coalition to design a proposal for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and their designs gave the organization the political leverage it needed to reclaim the abandoned land for public recreation. The project, currently under construction, is one of the studio’s first large-scale and long-term communityfocused initiatives.

Interval Projects is also transforming a Superfund site in Butte, Montana. After the EPA’s initial proposal to cap the site—formerly part of a copper mining operation in need of a decades-long cleanup—in a layer of concrete, Wise and Clouette were hired by the Restore Our Creek Coalition—a network of businesses, non-profits, artists, gardeners, and other community members—to draft a proposal that offered access to the land. (The community was so eager for their input that their project fee was covered by a local nun.) Instead of capping the site in concrete, Interval Projects’s plan removed mining waste from the creek, treated the water, and restored the space for public use.

In both cases, Wise and Clouette’s designs were eventually handed over to another architect, engineer, and builder to take over, due to the particularities of publicly funded constructions. But this collaborative cadence is just part of the process for the Interval Projects co-founders. “I like to use the analogy of a beach ball,” Clouette offers. “The ball has certain physical parameters that are built into its design, but once you throw it into a crowd, the social situation that unfolds isn’t in your control.”

ANNA PUIGJANER, MARIA CHARNECO, ALFREDO LÉRIDA, AND GUILLERMO LÓPEZ founded Barcelonabased studio MAIO in 2012 as a platform for discussion and collaboration. It was also a response to the ongoing housing crisis they saw in the Spanish city. The four architects had observed the over-construction of homes designed around the ideal of the nuclear family that directly contradicted what they knew of the city’s population and its needs. For this reason, López says, MAIO is devoted to designing “flexible typologies that can adapt through time and go beyond a specific and static family type.” The studio works in a way that, as Puigjaner puts it, “embeds time into their systems.”

For 110 Rooms—what could be considered their breakout project—the founders set out to create housing that would appeal to more than one demographic group, and that could adapt and change over time. “The building is composed of rooms that are similar in size, so that any domestic program can take place anywhere,” Puigjaner says of the project, which was completed in Barcelona in 2016. The rooms can be rearranged and reshaped, creating differently sized apartments as occupants’ needs shift. “The idea is that in one hundred years, it can continue to evolve.” This same flexible and adaptable thinking has since inspired a new social housing project just outside of Barcelona, in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, which MAIO finished this February. The project borrows much of its form from the geometrically striking 110 Rooms, and also includes small gardens for each unit. As Puigjaner asserts, sticking with a proven typology makes a huge impact when working within a government-subsidized budget. “You can work toward ef ficiency in both the design and its afterlife,” she explains of the building, which is being designed with transversal ventilation to “reduce heating and cooling costs once residents move in.” It also includes a semiexterior room in each unit for the same purposes.

Next year, MAIO will finish a very different project: a private house with an interior containing both living quarters and a garden, complete with fl ooring made of soil. “Plants can root anywhere,” asserts Puigjaner, who notes that the soil floors will make the home “feel both indoor and outdoor at the same time.” Further expanding its scope, the team is also collaborating with DOGMA and Tatiana Bilbao to build a Cistercian monastery in Brandenburg, Germany, from scratch.