EFGH is a New York-based architectural design practice founded in 2007 by principals Hayley Eber and Frank Gesualdi. The studio actively engages projects across scales: from the projective design of large urban sites to innovation at the scale of custom furniture, and everything in between. We explore design as an extensive network of interrelated and often competing issues, interrogating them along the way. Our design process reflects an intense curiosity mixed with a drive for experimentation. An alphabetical amalgamation of our initials and a snippet of something larger, EFGH is neither at the beginning nor the end. We place ourselves directly into the mix of a variety of academic and professional networks in order to bring the best minds to every project we undertake. We are nimble and engage in design processes appropriate to the task: mixing research and experimentation with inventive digital methodologies and the close supervision of construction in the field. Hayley Eber, AIA (b. Johannesburg, South Africa) is an architect, designer and educator. She is currently an adjunct Professor at The Cooper Union in New York, a visiting lecturer at Princeton University and co-founder of EFGH. She received a B.A.S from The University of Cape Town in 1997, a B.Arch from the Cooper Union in 2000, and an M.Arch from Princeton University in 2002. She joined Diller Scofidio + Renfro in 2002, where her experience has ranged from temporary installation and media work, performance, architectural competitions and large scale urban projects. Prior to joining DS+R, she worked at Eisenman Architects in NY on The Arizona Cardinals Stadium and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and at Wiel Arets Architects in Maastricht on the Utrecht University Library. Frank Gesualdi (b. NY) received a Professional B. Arch from Syracuse University in 1999 and a M.S. in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University in 2004. He is currently teaching at Columbia GSAPP and The Pratt Institute. Before co-founding EFGH, Frank was a Senior Designer at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, where he worked extensively on the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts renovation, including the full redesign of Alice Tully Hall, as well as a number of international competitions. Prior to joining DS+R, Frank was Project Designer for STUDIOS Architecture in Washington, DC where he was a lead designer for The Nysmith School, a 22,000 SF school addition in Herndon, VA, as well as a number of innovative office designs for a variety of media companies.
www.efgh-ny.com 222 Broadway 18th Floor New York, NY 10038 Tel:212.865.7335 Fax:212.500.7532
HEDGEHOG Performance Pavilion Columbia, MD 2009 A 15’ x 15’ temporary performance pavilion designed within an extremely stringent budget and time line, Hedgehog hosted a lineup of diverse street performers from around the country, participating in an effort to raise money for youth homelessness. Part of a large summer concert festival attended by 35,000 people, Hedgehog was designed as a modular steel frame wrapped by a “skin” of 300 standard traffic cones and was erected in under 6 hours. It is “popup” architecture that turned speed to its advantage, using readymade materials in an unexpected way. The intense repetition of the ubiquitous traffic cone, an element of the street displaced into the woods, allowed this item to overcome its usual message of danger and caution and instead promoted a sense of festivity, even euphoria. Equipped with a state of the art sound system, Hedgehog happily stood out as a misplaced object invited for a short stay in a wooded setting.
STOREFRONT TETRIS Installation, Storefront For Art & Architecture 2013 Video games and Architecture. There’s a connection there somewhere. Asked to propose a drawing for display at Storefront’s POP: Protocols, Obsessions Positions event, the complex play that video games offer seemed a natural fit. Storefront’s facade, and its institutional agencey in NYC and beyond, are animated - always on the move and engaging the context in a dynamic state of sophisticated play. The 12 doors of the Storefront facade form the building blocks for an 8-bit Tetris game. Printed on lenticular film, the medium holds one second of gaming action. The viewer interacts through limited movement, watching the doors fall and construct a new cityscape below.
LINCOLN CENTER INFOSCAPE: BLADES 65TH STREET Permanent Installation, Lincoln Center (with Diller Scofidio + Renfro) New York, NY 2007 The Lincoln Center Information Landscape (“Infoscape”) is a campus-wide electronic information display system that broadcasts visual information about performing arts events into Lincoln Center’s public spaces and surrounding streets. The system retools proven technologies from commercial applications and combines them with traditional building materials to form a media architecture. Site-specific media architecture installations display time-based, dynamic video and text content at an urban scale in an artful way. The system includes centrally located campus-wide displays and locally situated Constituent-specific displays. Design guidelines were developed for a unified “look and feel” for all of the video content, while maintaining individual Constituent identities.
LINCOLN CENTER LED STAIR Permanent Installation, Lincoln Center (with Diller Scofidio + Renfro) New York, NY 2007 The media architecture installations include nineteen, non-standard video displays and various LED text displays (totaling approximately 2,000 linear feet). All video and text displays are networked together and controlled from one central control room. Infoscape includes campus-wide information displays (LED Blades, Infopeel, 65th Street LED Stair, Columbus Ave LED Stair), and constituent displays (Alice Tully Hall Box Office, the Juilliard School Box Office, and the Film Society Marquee and Box Office).
LINCOLN CENTER INFOPEEL Permanent Installation, Lincoln Center (with Diller Scofidio + Renfro) and Imaginary Forces New York, NY 2007 The Lincoln Center “Infopeel” is a large outdoor video display in front of Alice Tully Hall on Broadway. The Infopeel was built as a part of Lincoln Center’s architectural redesigna virtual carousel that houses all information and imagery for each constituent from the Philharmonic to the New York City Ballet, Film Society, and The Julliard School.
CINEREACH Office Space New York, NY 2009 Cinereach is a dynamic not-for-profit film production studio that supports filmmakers from all over the world through grants and fellowships. For its very first office space Cinereach asked EFGH for something open, informal and inspired more by the vital atmosphere of an urban cafĂŠ than by a typical office environment. The 5,500 ft2 loft is designed to house the multi-programmatic elements of a high-tech media company. A platform on the lower level accommodates a diversity of functions: 2 editing bays, a conference space, a kitchen with seating and storage below. While the bamboo and steel platform acts as a knuckle to the space, a continuous 40 ft bent steel shelving system provides a functionally integrated storage system and work surface along the edge.
WALL SYSTEM
PROGRAM MATRIX
VAN ALEN GROUND/WORK Competition Finalist, New York, NY 2013 Interior = City. A microcosm of the space of the city, the new Van Alen Institute is imagined as a container for dynamic life. As an institution committed to the expansion of the definition of “public architecture” and the processes that shape the public realm, the VAI needs a home that embodies that ambition. Recognizing the dramatic proportions of the existing site as an opportunity, the proposed new Ground/ Work space turns a long skinny ground floor volume into a virtue: it maximizes the street level space, creating a single room - a large “grand hall” - that strives to reach the scale of the street, and extend the life of 22nd Street into the heart of the Institute. Through the easy manipulation of three mobile components in the space, The Media Wedge, The Bleacher and the Hinge Table, the VAI can be radically transformed by a few employees in a short amount of time.
VAN ALEN INSTITUTE
Ground / Competition Finalist New York, NY, 2013
EXPLODED AXONOMTERIC
When one asks “What is the new space of the Van Alen Institute; A Workspace, Exhibition space, Lecture Hall, Book/ Media Outlet, Public Forum, Conference space, Performance Space or Party space?” The only suitable answer is ... All of the Above.
+ ATTIC STAIR
= GROUP SEATS
+ BOOK STORAGE
= BLEACHER
+ DESK
MEDIA WEDGE
= STAGE
+ SWING
RETRACTABLE BLEACHER
HINGE TABLE
= PARK BENCH
STREET SWING
HINGE TABLE
8’-
0”
STREET SWING
8’-
0”
STREET SWING DISASSEMBLED
ANE
CEILING PL
RETRACTABLE BLEACHER
SECTION DIAGRAM
DOGMATIC Flagship Restaurant Union Sq, NYC, 2008 The design of a 600 sq ft interior and storefront for the new flagship restaurant Dogmatic Gourmet Sausage System on Union Square, NYC is based on the aesthetics of the butchery. A 14’x4’ communal butcher-block table nearly fills the space and incorporates retractable cantilevered seating to avoid any freestanding furniture. A raised built-in banquet on the west wall overlooks the restaurant while providing the base for the Sausage Wall-of Fame. A mural describing the Dogmatic story is baked onto the ceramic tiles using a transfer toner technique. The custom steel storefront doors pivot open to allow maximum openness and connection with the street, plugging the interior space into the dynamic life of the sidewalk.
RETRACTABLE CANTILEVERED SEAT
AXO
A
3/4” STL. PLATE FIN
B
BALL BEARING CAM FOLLOWERS
C
1/2” STL. PLATE ARM
D
2” TH. MAPLE SEAT
TABLE CROSS SECTION
STREE
WRAP DRES
PERFORMA
STREETWEAR/ STREET FEST Competiton, 2nd place, NYC 2012 Street Wear is a modular shelter system that highlights the interconnectedness of products, systems, and spaces in the urban environment. Taking advantage of rented scaffold structures which are used as a device for building, and altering the city’s appearance, as well as re-routing pedestrians through our city’s constantly changing landscape; Street Wear allows participants to re-think their relationship to the common spaces of New York’s sidewalks and streets. The curtain component of the scaffold design shifts the function of the sidewalk from a place of traversal, to a gathering space for social engagement and the exchange of ideas and resources.Over the course of the three day festival, the project invites visitors to engage in the activity of re-purposing and recycling as they participate in the dismantling of the curtain wall, transforming it into products such as; bags, ponchos, and jackets. The participant engages in the very material of the project by wearing or carrying a part of the soft enclosure throughout Streetfest and the rest of the city.
ET WEAR
CARDIGAN ARCADE
COVER-ALL CLASSROOM
CROP TOP BAR
CIRCLE SKIRT SEWING COURT
SS
ANCE SPACE
KIMONO EXHIBITION SPACE
SLIP DRESS CAFETERIA
OPEN HOUSE Installation Levittown, NY 2011 With collaborative consumption and new practices of service becoming increasingly widespread, existing spatial rules of the suburbs have become outdated and inadequate. Future Open Houses invites guests of Open House to an overview of the ways in which the new practices of Service might affect the spaces, patterns and protocols of the suburb. A 6-block case study zone in Levittown has been selected. What if a user-generated, bottom-up service economy were to take hold here? What are the logics of organization that would emerge? How would new landscape patterns, zoning codes and public/ private relationships evolve? EFGH proposes a catalogue of extended house typologies and spatial negotiations for the suburbs where increased density, opportunistic land use and new combinations of program coexist.
BA
ING
IV D L
AR CKY
RUN
5
GY
DOG
9
10
1
D
3
4
SE
HOU
D/ YAR
P
SWA
OOL
CH L S
POO
8
DOG E &
AR AYC
M
AR D F
YAR NT FRO
6
D M
YAR
5
E HOM
R
ATE
THE
2
AY
VEW
DRI
SUPPL
IES
AGE
GAR
ET ARK
RU
DR
TH IVE
TOWE
D
BAN
7
R LI VING LEIS URE LAWN
YOUPrison: Does the Punishment Fit the Crime? Turin, Italy 2008 While architectures role in reforming the prison system may be arguable, incarceration is undoubtedly a spatial issue. The prison isolates the criminal at a safe distance from the fluid space of the public and places him or her within an irreducible space deemed habitable. Punishment is calculated along a spatio-temporal matrix; the more severe the crime, the more punitive the space and the longer the prisoner is condemned to it. This punishment formula comes into question with criminal acts of ethical ambiguity. Visitors to the installation are asked to rethink the fit between crime and punishment. A touch screen is the interface for this intricate and politically charged interactive video game. Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is confronted with a LCD screen displaying a matrix of crimes selected for their severity and moral ambiguity: drug use, sexual deviance, insider trading, conspiracy, disturbing the peace, unlawful conduct, illegal immigration, etc. After a crime is selected, the screen renders an initial cell design as an interactive panorama. By pointing the screen in any direction, left-right-up-down, the view will be displayed as a virtual transparency aligned with the space beyond.
VEGETATION SOLAR WIND
Billboard Park Rosario, Argentina 2010 A vital component of the current effort to revitalize Rosario, Argentina’s industrial waterfront, Billboard Park is a recreation landscape that occupies both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of a triangular site in order to provide an open lawn as well as river vistas for the public. Part of a public/ private partnership, Billboard Park stacks up to form a two-sided vertical landscape, its green side facing the river and its urban side, an illuminated billboard, facing the highway and neighborhood beyond. A lightweight, soil-free growth medium is used to generate a vertical garden across a concrete structural honeycomb. This honeycomb is also an infrastructural scaffold for the collection and harvesting of wind, solar energy and water. The open structural pattern organizes both the horizontal and vertical planes and provides a number of occupiable niches as well as a dynamic visual icon for Rosario.
PARK WATER RETENTION
Happy Corp Global HQ New York, NY 2008 A 5,000 sq ft open L shaped loft houses the HappyCorp Global Headquarters on Broome st, in New York. The project turns budget, program demands and a tight time frame into the generative solution for the project, which was designed, built and operational within 2 months. The custom designed work stations are condensed in to an area so that communication and collaboration can occur naturally with the open plan. The conference room is designed on a storage platform with an acoustic curtain, which doubles up as a stage for events and presentations. Given the client’s need for supple programming, the other areas remain flexible for group presentations, silk screening, photo/video shoots, ping-pong and food preparations. The bathrooms incorporate pink urinals with frosted plexi partitions, to allow for shadowed translucency between the two bathrooms.