New Affiliates

Before and After

Lecture by Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb of New Affiliates.

This lecture will be presented virtually, please join on Zoom.
Meeting ID: 910 0657 7650

New Affiliates is an award-winning, New York-based design practice led by Ivi Diamantopoulou (AIA) and Jaffer Kolb. The studio works on institutional, residential, and commercial projects from ground-up buildings to historical renovations to public initiatives. They have completed a range of installations and exhibitions with PERFORMA, the Park Avenue Armory, the Swiss Institute, the Jewish Museum and the Shed among many others. The studio is invested in exploring design at the intersection of environmental and cultural matter through reuse and civic engagement, collaborating with New York City’s Departments of Parks and Sanitation. Awards include the Architectural League Prize, the New York New Practices award by the AIA, and recently a Public Design Award by the City of New York. Their work has been profiled, published, and exhibited internationally.

Working at a certain scale in New York, we’ve become accidental preservationists. Or maybe you could say ‘preservationists-by-necessity,’ as we navigate the complexities of our projects and material economies of use and re-use in the city. We consider preservation through scales of time: inheriting past conditions and weaving them into new configurations, inserting temporary programs into spaces that host them time and again, layering past renovations with new iterations, and attempting to predict future incarnations wherever possible. In our practice, preservation represents a dynamic spectrum that encompasses materials, assemblies, surfaces, and uses–all of which we study, draw, and work with as we consider any site and any intervention. In this talk we will present a series of projects that navigate before to after and after to before, at different speeds and scales. We’ll consider how time reframes our projects from design to construction to demolition–from the fragile to the permanent, the found to the imagine

Join via Zoom

Free and open to the public.

Organized as part of the Preservation Lecture Series, an initiative of the Historic Preservation Program at Columbia GSAPP.