Constructing Practice: Ultramoderne

Aaron Forrest and Yasmin Vobis, co-founders of Ultramoderne, talk about how their practice began, their systems-based approach, and interest in material experimentation. Ultramoderne was founded in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2015. The office is committed to creating architecture and public spaces that are at once modern, playful, and generous. The principals are driven by an experimental approach that leads to conceptually rigorous and well-executed designs. The office has experience working at a wide variety of scales, from single-family residences to urban-scale planning, and its work has been recognized internationally, including the 2015 pavilion commission from the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Architectural League of New York, and AIAri.

“For us the work is always a dialogue between abstraction and reality. I think that the projects look simple on the surface: squares, circles, triangles, and so forth. But I think that for us the abstraction is a way of reorganizing a piece of reality.”
—Yasmin Vobis

Constructing Practice traces the narratives of young firms from around the globe, featuring the participants of a Columbia GSAPP symposium that took place on November 17, 2017, and expands the conversation to include many others, to tell us how they do what they do. Hosted by GSAPP Professor Juan Herreros, principal of Estudio Herreros in Madrid.

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