UN Studio Book

An hour by train north of Rotterdam, Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos preside over the 45-person UN Studio they founded in 1998. To the tune of one partner's proclamation that "the box is dead," they have spent the intervening years conducting a network of researchers and specialists in architecture, urban development, and infrastructure, whose goal it is to create perceptive projects which seamlessly weld together brief, construction, infrastructure, circulation, form, and space. Their Erasmus Bridge, a sinuous arc of roadway suspended from a single soaring pylon, à la Star Wars, has become the icon of a new Rotterdam. Their science center for Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, holds itself erect with a Euclidean grid of beams and columns, a structure van Berkel describes as "a sock being pulled back on itself." Following the success of their three-volume publication Move, and in search of new perspectives and concepts, UN Studio presents UNFOLD. Complete with documentation of the firm's most recent projects, UNFOLD takes a critical look at a welter of hitherto unpublished designs, including the restructuring of the station area in Arnhem, the generating station in Innsbrück, the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance laboratory in Utrecht, and the competition-winning design for the Ponte Parodi in Genoa. Draped with an ultra-personal layer, UNFOLD offers an immersion in the firm's design process through texts by Bos, and experiments in association and out-of-the-rut architectural photography. We decided that architects and architectural studio are so boring. We are built along the idea of a United Network. We'd like to network with all the people who think in a different way about architecture. You could call it a club. We chat, and we brainstorm. --Ben van Berkel Edited and with texts by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos. Essay by Aaron Betsky, Mark Wigley, Neal Leach, and Lidewij Edelkoort. Interview with Caroline Bos and Ben van Berkel by Greg Lynn and Daniel Birnbaum.Read More