Inhabiting Identity

Inhabiting Identity is the fifth in an annual series of publications featuring the best young architects as selected by the Architectural League of New York. For this year's competition architects were asked to explore how technology has altered our sense of space. Their answers challenge our sense of habitation and teach us to think beyond the normal and the mundane. This year's winners of the competition - Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen, Steven Mankouche, Ben Checkwitch, Stella Betts, Lisa Hsieh, and Mike Latham - make use of unusual materials (wooden shipping pallets) while maintaining creative ideas (mobile rooms) in their investigations of the role of modern technology in our daily lives. Forsythe and MacAllen designed and built three houses, all of which are shown in Inhabiting Identity. Their focus is to engage in urban housing and public spaces, in particular, urban housing that contributes to the public space. Steven Mankouche presents an installation designed for the 1999 Indefinite House Shinkenchi-ku Residential Design Competition and later built in Snowmass, Colorado. This wireless teahouse is constructed of recycled wooden industrial pallets.
Ben Checkwitch's folding steel and plexiglas table/screen provided a viewing area for images of his works. A kind of world within a world, with transformable shape the installation aligns with Checkwitch's architectural explorations, namely his transportable "borderless room". Stella Betts started Leven Betts Studio. The primary focus of the studio concerns the experience of the individual in architecture and the urban realm; in other words, how one understands and navigates one's surroundings is central to their work. Lisa Hsieh considers the ideal of the lightness in living, of mobility, flexibility, of possibility, and freedom. Mike Latham is principal and founder of Arts Corporation, a New York based design firm interested in the intersections of architecture, art and technology.