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Montauk Residence on A Weekly Dose of Architecture

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Montauk Residence Wins Second AIA NY State Design Award

The guesthouse at the Montauk Residence designed by James Biber and his team at Pentagram Architects has won a Citation for Design in the 2009 AIA New York State Design Awards. The project was recognized in the Residential, Small Projects (under 2,000 sq ft) category of the competition. The guesthouse is adjacent to the main house, which received its own Citation for Design in the 2006 AIANYS awards in the Residential, Large Projects category.

Each house has its own identity, yet they complement each other on the site. The guesthouse is supported on steel beams that give it the appearance of being almost entirely airborne, hovering over a pool and the ocean beyond. The guesthouse plan is modeled on a motel, with access to rooms off a continuous balcony that looks on the residence’s courtyard. The side facing away from the property has been louvered to conceal the neighbor’s house next door and at the same time preserve the ocean views and allow for air circulation. More about the Montauk Residence here.

Project Team: James Biber, FAIA, Michael Zweck-Bronner, AIA, Alex Mergold, AIA, Suzanne Holt and Denise Ramzy.

James Biber’s Moleskine on View at the Art Directors Club

James Biber filled a Moleskine notebook with a year’s worth of images and sketches.

Last winter James Biber was invited by I.D. Magazine to fill a Moleskine sketchbook for A Week in Your Life – 13 Book d’Autore, an exhibition of notebooks from 13 architects, designers and writers. Originally on view in Milan for 2009 International Design Week, the exhibition has now reached the Art Directors Club in New York, where, following a one night viewing for last week’s Stationery Show, it will be exhibited this Friday, May 29 for a viewing timed to Book Expo America.

Each participant in the exhibition was sent a notebook from Moleskine’s new Folio Collection and asked to document a week in their lives. For his book, Biber took the opportunity to go further. “During the last week of the year I collected the previous 12 months in an album of collage, images and sketches,” he says.

“Digital images, though convenient and easy to manage, are inherently non-tactile, can’t be juxtaposed or drawn on, and sit too neatly in the software’s grid. The Moleskine, and some transfer film, allowed me to create composites, contrasts and collages of a year’s worth of travel and projects. It’s the one chance to do what we all used to do with pictures: sort them, pile them up, throw them on a table and see them as objects rather than digital files.

“I plan to make it a yearly ritual. Finally, I am a part of the scrapbooking movement. Next, decoupage.”

Other participants in the exhibition include Yves Béhar, Marian Bantjes, Ayse Birsel, Han Feng, Michael Graves and Jessica Helfand. Friday night’s viewing runs from 6:30 to 9:30 pm and is open to the public. At the Art Directors Club, 106 West 29th Street in New York City.

Pentagram Named Studio of the Year by ‘Creative Review’

For the second year running, Pentagram has been named the Studio of the Year by Creative Review. The award is announced in the magazine’s 2009 Annual, published with the May issue, on newsstands now. The Design Studio of the Year designation is given to the studio with the most work accepted into the annual.

Four Pentagram projects were selected by the judging panel for inclusion in the 2009 annual: Beat IV, designed by Angus Hyland; the Harley-Davidson Museum, with architecture by James Biber and exhibition design by Abbott Miller; the book Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, designed by Miller; and the posters for Brno Echo: Ornament and Crime from Adolf Loos to Now, also designed by Miller.

We’ll be shooting for a threepeat in 2010!

Previously: Creative Review Names Pentagram Design Studio of the Year (2008)

James Biber’s Moleskine on View at Milan Design Week

James Biber filled a Moleskine notebook for an exhibition currently on view in Milan.

This past winter James Biber was invited by I.D. Magazine to fill a Moleskine sketchbook for A Week in Your Life – 13 Book d’Autore, an exhibition of notebooks from 13 architects, designers and writers that is currently on view in Milan as part of 2009 International Design Week. Other participants in the exhibition include Yves Béhar, Ayse Birsel, Marian Bantjes, Han Feng, Michael Graves, Jessica Helfand, Seth Godin and Linda Tischler.

Each participant was sent a notebook from Moleskine’s new Folio Collection and asked to document a week in their lives. In his book Biber catalogs influences on his work and considers his own recent projects like the Harley-Davidson Museum .

A Week in Your Life – 13 Book d’Autore opened this past Monday (pics here) and will remain on view through next Monday, April 27 at la Feltrinelli, piazza Piemonte 2, Milan. In addition to being displayed in the show, the notebooks have been photographed and their contents filmed. The books are also featured in the May issue of I.D. (print version only) and will be coming to New York for a future engagement, to be announced. The notebooks will eventually be donated to the archive of Lettera 27, a non-profit foundation that supports the right to literacy.

New Work: Newark Gateways

How do you create an identifying landmark for a city that is chiefly known as a place to pass through? This spring Pentagram Architects was invited by the City of Newark, New Jersey Division of Planning & Community Development to submit a proposal for “This Is Newark,” an initiative to create a series of “gateways” for the city. The proposed designs are on view in an exhibition at Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art in downtown Newark through this Saturday, April 18, when the city will host a roundtable discussion about the proposals.

The designers were asked to mark the points of arrival in Newark and to address the history and culture of the city in the urban landscape. Only eight miles from New York City, Newark is home to Newark Liberty International Airport; Port Newark, the largest container port on the Eastern Seaboard; and Mayor Corey Booker, a rising star in the Democratic party.

Our design considers the nature of travel and Newark’s role as a hub. It is no accident that the assignment for the Newark gateways project was delivered as a Google Earth file: this is, more and more, the way we virtually “travel.” Our gateways address both remote and local audiences with a set of ideas that are legible in reality and cyber-reality. In our concept, a series of painted “events” on the Newark streetscape would bring Newark to the world, and bring the world to Newark.

Harley-Davidson Museum in Architectural Lighting

Quick Link: Harley-Davidson Museum in Architectural Lighting

Pentagram Architects Refashions Garment District for ‘WWD’

Just in time for Fashion Week, Pentagram Architects was one of seven firms asked to envision the future of New York’s Fashion District for a feature in today’s issue of Women’s Wear Daily. Pentagram’s proposal presents six horizontal tower-sized buildings positioned above the street that would “stitch” the district back together and provide the most spectacular event spaces—and catwalks—in the world. Distinctive glass curtain wall designs such as stripes, plaid and mesh would give each structure its own identity and brand the group as a whole.

New Work: Intimacy

During the financially dismal 2008 holiday shopping season, one product held up nicely: bras. Intimacy, a growing chain of high-end intimate apparel stores, saw its sales increase 4.4 percent over the past year, a period during which it launched a new identity by Pentagram and a new store design by Pentagram Architects.

Located in upscale shopping malls across the country, Intimacy as a brand differentiates itself from its competitors by offering personalized bra fitting services, elegant environments and European designer brands such as La Perla. The first store built with the new design is in Boston’s Copley Place, the city’s most distinctive shopping destination, and will serve as the prototype for future stores, as it has for Intimacy’s most recent outlet in Miami.

Developed by James Biber and Associate Michael Zweck-Bronner, the Intimacy environments feature spacious, well-appointed fitting rooms, high-end furnishings and fittings, and a refined color palette of gray and gold. Intimacy’s logo, designed by Paula Scher, is evoked in the details of the store’s design. Custom-designed hangers and gold environmental graphics play off the mark’s ornamental brackets that snugly embrace the company’s name.

A look inside Intimacy after the jump.

The New White House(s)

White House Redux is a call for ideas competition to re-envision the White House just in time for the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States. Sponsored by the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the competition required participants to contemplate what the White House would look like if it were to be built today. Addressing a complex set of issues including individual and national power, hierarchy, communication and accessibility, James Biber and his team at Pentagram Architects submitted a proposal called the New White House that fractures the functions of the famous residence into a series of buildings whose forms expressly represent their function. And they’re not necessarily white!

Full proposal after the jump.