AN ARCHITECTURAL DUO THAT’S ‘LOCALLY ROOTED AND NATIONLESS’

THE FOUNDERS OF SO-IL TALK ABOUT STARTING A FIRM DURING A DOWNTURN, GROWING THEIR BUSINESS, AND WHAT’S IN STORE FOR THE FUTURE

The Amant Arts Campus in Brooklyn, N.Y., offers a residency program for artists, and is spread across three blocks in an industrial neighborhood. SO-IL designed the space from scratch. Since founding their New York City-based architectural firm SO-IL in 2008, Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg have taken on projects around the world. Describing itself as “both locally rooted and nationless,” the firm’s portfolio includes a library in Cleveland and an art museum in Seoul, as well as interactive public installations and fashion showrooms. Clients include Google, Versace, and the Whitney Museum.

Liu, 42, was born in Nanjing, China, attended high school in Japan, and got her architectural education in New Orleans at Tulane University. Idenburg, 47, grew up in the Netherlands and Colombia. They met in Tokyo, where Idenburg worked at the SANAA architectural firm for eight years.

In June, Williams College announced that SO-IL had been chosen as architects of a new building for the Williams College Museum of Art on the college’s campus in Williamstown, Mass.

Here they talk about their inspirations and designs and what’s next for their busy and growing firm.

What drew you to architecture? jing liu: I was always artistically inclined. I also love engineering and physics—the tinkling of things and understanding their inner workings. But above all I loved the cities, the history, and the culture of it all. I love learning about how a city became what it is and looking at them and imagining how they might evolve. florian idenburg: What attracted me about the field was the way it combines artistry, technology, and society. It gives shape and form and experience to things that are happening in the world. At 16, I decided that this is what I wanted to do. Also, I have a distant family member, a great uncle of mine, Hendrik Petrus Berlage, who is considered the Frank Lloyd Wright of Dutch architecture.

You’ve always had your offices in Brooklyn, and you live there now. What do you like about Brooklyn? liu: We live near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and I just love it there. It’s one of the last remaining industrial and manufacturing neighborhoods in New York. The city of New York in general is very stimulating. You have people from all over the world, all walks of life, speaking so many different languages. That in itself keeps your brain working, as creative people. idenburg: New York is the best place for two noncitizens to live. We love the diversity of Brooklyn, the vibes, as my daughters

Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg founded SO-IL together in 2008. would say. We have many friends that are combined cultures, like us, and it’s a very attractive place for them.

How do you find working together as a husband-and-wife team? idenburg: When you start a practice you have to invest a lot of time—architecture is very time consuming. We were starting a family at the same time, and it’s a similar investment of time. Doing it together, it was easy to do these two things at the same time. But we do spend all this time together and you never really leave your job. Our daughters call it ‘archi-torture’ because we do talk a lot about work. But it works well for us.

liu: We know each other so well. Often we can complete each other’s sentences with only a few words. So that’s very efficient. We get a lot done together quickly. But when we don’t agree or can’t get on the same page with some things, it also takes a lot of work to break out of our own pattern. But this is also productive because it keeps us critical of ourselves and you need that.

How has your firm evolved since you founded it in 2008? idenburg: We launched our firm in 2008, when the Great Recession was just beginning. Half of the architects in New York lost their jobs and many firms closed. The beginning was hard. We were very frugal and nimble. We gradually built up our name and reputation. Now people come to us.

Since 2008, the country has had a quite successful economy, and we’ve grown along with that. We’re now a 25-person firm. We do mostly cultural projects and we work all over the world—Australia, China, Korea, Mexico, France, Portugal, Italy. Since Covid, there has been a new paradigm shift. A lot of our work is now local, which is very exciting. liu: Over the last five, six, seven years, we’ve gotten more familiar with the U.S. market and how cultural decisions are made.

Speaking of local, your new Amant Arts Campus in Brooklyn recently won an award from the prestigious Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize. Tell us more about Amant and how it came to be. idenburg: It took a while because we were building a new institution from scratch. Our client, Lonti Ebers, was noticing that it was becoming harder and harder for artists to spend time in New York. She wanted to create a residency program for artists, in which they have six months to work and think and slow down without having to produce anything, and they get a stipend and have a home in the city. It’s four buildings in an industrial area in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. The campus is surrounded by large industrial buildings. Our challenge was to create a home and a welcoming place in this area. We linked the four buildings with an alleyway system that creates an oasis. We used a lot of green and exterior spaces to try to create interesting spaces within that environment. The campus also has three gallery spaces and a performing arts space, and there is a bookshop and cafe that is open to the public. I applaud what Lonti Ebers has done here. There are very few people who have the audacity to create cultural institutions from scratch.

What can you tell us about the new museum at Williams College? liu: We have just started the process. We are doing a lot of workshops with the college’s various stakeholders in order to define the project ambitions. Williams is one of the country’s, and perhaps the world’s, top teaching museums, so the ambition is certainly very high and that’s very exciting. We hope to make the building and the design process itself a productive teaching tool for the future of cultural institutions. With the energetic conversations around equity, inclusion, and diversity, and the new knowledge emerging around climate change, there is so much that museums have to learn. We feel very fortunate to be working with Williams on these issues. I think by next year we will have something to share with the public.