nARCHITECTS
(USA)
Eric Bunge (1967), Mimi Hoang (1971)
Eric Bunge (1967), Mimi Hoang (1971)
Montreal-born
Eric Bunge studied architecture at McGill University and then worked with
several architects in North America and Europe (Kennedy & Violich, Diller
+ Scofidio, Paul Andreu, Franck Hammoutène). While preparing his
master's degree at Harvard GSD in 1995, he met Mimi Hoang, from Vietnam,
who had trained at MIT in Cambridge and been associated with Steven Holl.
Together they founded the nARCHITECTS agency in New York, in 1999. Their
experimental and innovative architecture is based on a broad concept of
"the environment"--not just natural, social or urban, but also
never detached from its cultural, infrastructural and technological conditions.
In their book, architecture must make things explicit and reconsider the
relations, dynamics and possibilities which underpin this environment, pushed
to its limits. In the project for Aomori (Japan, 2001), they attempted to
weave together the urban and the suburban, and the natural and the artificial.
Their "e-Central Park" project (New York, 2001) involved challenging
the influence of information technologies on our physical perception of
the park, and the project for the Pro Forma Hotel (Copenhagen, 2000) involved
adapting the hotel space to new forms of nomadism.