On Saturday, September 8 from 1 – 4 p.m., Art Omi: Architecture presents an afternoon celebrating new and experimental architecture in and around the Hudson Valley region, featuring the inauguration of Zoid, as well as a book signing with David Sokol, author of Hudson Modern: Residential Landscapes (Monacelli Press). Zoid is a project of Manhattan-based architecture firm LevenBetts, and the latest pavilion to be included in Architecture Field 01. Hudson Modern is a new book devoted to contemporary domestic architecture in the region, and includes Open House, a home by LevenBetts.
ABOUT ZOID + LEVENBETTS
Zoid is an architect’s artwork: a shelter made of six equal repeated shapes—volumetric right trapezoids—that enclose an open courtyard. Zoid posits a way of living—somewhere between a house and a campsite—focused on basic elements needed to live in the world. Both a stripped down shelter and a “proto-proto-type” for an affordable house, Zoid is designed to prioritize nature and the collective engagement with others. Affordability and habitabilty will be the ultimate goal of Zoid as both a shelter and as a house. As such the project intends to recast the material production of socially just living space.
David Leven and Stella Betts (LevenBetts) are architects and artists who have a long tradition working together and separately in the arts. Together they have made spaces for the display of art and have created work for arts exhibitions. They started their New York City-based award winning architecture practice, LevenBetts in 1997 and focus on art and design at all scales including urban design, public architecture, houses and housing, commercial workspaces, exhibitions and furniture. LevenBetts is nationally and internationally recognized through publication and awards.
ABOUT HUDSON MODERN: RESIDENTIAL LANDSCAPES
As the birthplace of American landscape painting, the Hudson River Valley has long been a refuge from the city and a laboratory for new aesthetic expression. Today, thanks to its ascendant reputation as a weekend utopia, architects are extending that tradition into the built environment. Designing residences that revere local climate, landscape, and history in a distinctly modernist language, these talents are sowing a new Hudson River school of architectural thought.
Hudson Modern surveys this emerging domestic architecture, featuring nearly twenty houses that integrate with site and region through composition, scale, and materials, and which strike a balance between innovation and rootedness. A reconstructed midcentury house accented in cedar, walnut, and bluestone by Joel Sanders and landscaped by the late Diana Balmori blurs the edge of habitation and nature. KieranTimberlake revises the classic vision of a glass box by cladding a home on a rocky site in Pound Ridge in a tapestry of steel, aluminum, copper, and glass. In Rhinebeck, Steven Holl experiments with a radical form that has both ecological and social dimensions.
Author David Sokol presents these and numerous other examples of design-forward residences that are responsive to terrain, building vernacular, and cultural legacy. Together, the new Hudson Valley houses point a way forward for rural living in the twenty-first century.
“In Hudson Modern: Residential Landscapes David Sokol highlights 18 homes in the Hudson River Valley of New York, revealing how the bucolic region that inspired landscape painters now supports forward-thinking design.” —The New York Times
“A peek into the most beautiful modernist residences that dot the region—proof that architects like Steven Holl, Kiernan Timberlake, and Joel Sanders are just as likely as the artists to fall prey to the charms of this unique region.” —Galerie
“As a whole, this book shows us something very different than similar publications: 18 recent designs that are relatively unpretentious, all highly respectful of their environment, and without a McMansion in sight.” —Interior Design
ABOUT ART OMI: ARCHITECTURE
The Art Omi: Architecture program is conceived to facilitate projects exploring the intersection of architecture, art and landscape by architects. Nestled within the campus of Art Omi, this program offers pristine, 60-acre fields designated to cultivate the production of physical structures such as pavilions, installations, landscape interventions, and constructed environments. In addition, the program encourages the integration of all varieties of related media, ideas, propositions and curated exhibitions in a landscaped setting. Since January 2016, Manhattan-based architect Warren James has served as Director of Art Omi: Architecture.
ABOUT ART OMI
Art Omi is a not-for-profit arts organization offering world-class public exhibitions, arts events, education programming, and international residency programs for visual artists, writers, translators, musicians, and dancers. Art Omi: The Fields Sculpture Park presents the works of internationally recognized contemporary and modern artists, offering the unique possibility to experience a wide range of large-scale works in a singular outdoor environment.
