Ivi Diamantopoulou & Jaffer Kolb

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Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb, co-founders, New Affiliates, present the lecture "Present Past, Future Perfect" at 12:00 p.m. cst via Zoom as part of the 2021-2022 Rice Architecture Lecture Series, Building Identities, Fall Edition.

In our practice we balance ourselves precariously between time zones. That is, in engaging historic conditions while studying the impacts of architecture on the near-future. We toy with conditions of the past, intermingling those with our own interventions through adaptive reuse, by incorporating found material in anything new and generative. We look ahead to see how architecture’s byproducts will withstand time--to try and predict material flows that we are implicated in producing and that, at best, we might orchestrate differently. Through this talk, we’ll look at a few key projects touching on past, present, and future.   

New Affiliates is an award-winning New York-based design practice led by Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb. They have completed a range of work, from ground up projects to interiors to exhibitions and installations for institutions including the New York's Jewish Museum, the Shed, and the Canadian Center for Architecture.

Alongside commissioned work, they look to initiate projects and collaborations that focus on matters of reuse within a context of material excess, particularly as it relates to current standards of practice. For this work they have collaborated with various branches of the New York City government, including the Departments of Sanitation and Parks and Recreation.

Their work has been exhibited and published internationally. In 2018 they were named "Next Progressives" by Architect Magazine and were featured in the Architects Newspaper Interior's Top 50 list in 2018 and 2019. In Spring 2020, they were awarded the Architectural League Prize by the Architectural League of New York and the New York New Practices Award by the American Institute of Architects.

Ivi Diamantopoulou is a registered architect NY and Greece, with over a decade of experience in designing and realizing built work. Prior to New Affiliates she worked in Europe and the United States, most recently as an Associate at MOS Architects in New York. Alongside practice, she frequently teaches design, history and theory of architecture. She holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton, where she was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize for excellence in design and the Stanley J Seeger fellowship; and a Diploma with honors in Architecture and Engineering from the University of Patras.

Prior to founding N/A, Jaffer Kolb worked as a designer in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles for a range of international studios. He is currently an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University’s GSAPP, and was the 2015 Muschenheim Fellow at the University of Michigan's Taubman College. Previously he worked on the 13th Venice Architecture Biennial under David Chipperfield and before that was the US editor for the Architectural Review. He holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University, a Master of Urban Planning from the London School of Economics, and a Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies from Wesleyan University.