Revisiting Henri Labrouste in the Digital Age: A Symposium
The Museum of Modern Art
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Michael Bell paper at MoMA
Simultaneous City, Temple Terrace, Florida "12 hours in 7 minutes 7 seconds" Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong
Foreclosed : Rehousing the American Dream
The Museum of Modern Art
Simultaneous City, Temple Terrace, Florida "Four months in 13 minutes 3 seconds" Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong
Foreclosed : Rehousing the American Dream
The Museum of Modern Art
Simultaneous City: Temple Terrace, Florida: The Musuem of Modern Art: Photograph by James Ewing
Selected Projects
Glass House @ 2 Degrees: Fifth Ward CRC, Houston, Texas
Gefter Press House, Hudson Valley, New York
Double Dihedral House: La Cienega, New Mexico
Arverne by the Sea: New York Department of Housing, Preservation and Development, New York City
Gefter Press House, Hudson Valley, New York
Eunjeong Seong, Installation Design: The Van Alen Institute, New York. "Flatiron: High and Low" / Curated by Joan Ockman
Michael Bell is an architect practicing in New York and a tenured professor of architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Bell is Director of the Master of Architecture program Core Design Studios and also directed the school’s housing design studios between 2000 and 2010. Bell chairs the Columbia Conference on Architecture, Engineering and Materials; a GSAPP collaboration with The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Bell’s architectural design has been commissioned by and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Venice Biennale, The Yale School of Architecture, The University Art Museum, Berkeley, and at Arci-Lab, France. Bell has received four Progressive Architecture Awards, and work is also included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His recently completed Binocular House is featured in Casabella, Metropolis, and in Kenneth Frampton’s American Masterwork Houses of the 20th and 21st Century. Books by Michael Bell include Engineered Transparency: The Technical, Visual, and Spatial Effects of Glass; 16 Houses: Designing the Public’s Private House; Michael Bell: Space Replaces Us: Essays and Projects on the City; and Slow Space.
Bell is a Visiting Fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. Bell has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and Rice University, and been a visiting professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, MIT, and also at University of Michigan where he held the Saarinen Professor of Architecture. Michael Bell Architecture, was established in 1989 and specializes in housing and urban redevelopment where housing is a key component. In 2001 Bell led a team of architects who provided research, planning, and design for 1800 units of housing on a 100-acre parcel of oceanfront land owned by the New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development (NYHPD). The project was commissioned by the Architectural League of New York and the NYHPD as a research proposal to guide city planning. Bell also founded 16 Houses, a housing research and design program in Houston, for the Fifth Ward Redevelopment Corporation.
Eunjeong Seong LEED, AP. M. Arch, Columbia University, GSAPP. B.S, College of Engineering, Inha University. Eunjeong Seong is an architect and founder of Visible Weather. Seong’s architectural design and urban design work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Van Alen Institute in New York. Seong holds a Master of Architecture Degree, Columbia University, where she was awarded the Matthew W. Del Gaudio Memorial Award from the New York Society of Architects for excellence in total design over the six-semester program and the Lucille Smyser Lowenfish Memorial for best studio project, and a post-graduate William Kinne Fellowship for travel/research. Seong has extensive experience in housing design in the United States and Korea and prior to forming Visible Weather she was a project designer at SHoP Architects, Dean/Wolf Architects, and SPACE Group, Seoul. She was the founding director of a New York City design office for Yamasaki Associates in 2007.
Seong has written for SPACE magazine where she was a contributing editor. Her work has been presented in lectures and conferences in New York at the Museum of Modern Art as well as Columbia University and PS1. It has also been shown network television on MSNBC, Fox Business News and Reuters television. Seong is currently teaching thesis for 5th year in undergraduate program at Pratt Institute and has taught at RPI, the Parsons School of Design and RISD.
Bell and Seong collaborate under the title Bell/Seong Visible Weather. This work includes a range of partners in eoncomics, engineering and materials science.
The Columbia Conference on Architecture, Engineering and Materials.
A five year collaboration and series of conferences /books and films examining the state of materials in architecture and engineering.
Convened by: The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP),
and the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, Department of Civil Engineering
and Engineering Mechanics, Columbia University.
Michael Bell, Conference Chair
Permanent Change:
Plastics in Architecture and Engineering
The Fourth Columbia Conference on Architecture, Engineering and Materials.
Permanent Change was convened In collaboration with: The Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design (ILEK),
Link: PDF of ProgramLink: Documentary Film: Michael Blackwood Productions
Publications: Books
Post Ductility: Metals in Architecture and Engineering, by Michael Bell and Craig Buckley. Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.
Solid States: Concrete in Transition, by Michael Bell and Craig Buckley. Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.
Engineered Transparency: The Technical, Visual, and Spatial Effects of Glass; Michael Bell and Jeannie Kim. Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
Michael Bell: Space Replaces Us: Essays and Projects on the City. The Monacelli Press, 2004.
16 Houses: Designing the Public's Private House by Michael Bell. The Monacelli Press, 2004
Slow Space, Edited by Michael Bell and Sze Tsung Leong. Monacelli Press 1998.
Stanley Saitowitz: Architecture at Rice, 33. Edited and with an introduction by Michael Bell. Princeton Architectural Press
Selected Publications: Design
Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream is an exploration of new architectural possibilities for American cities and suburbs in the aftermath of the recent foreclosure crisis in the United States. During the summer of 2011, five interdisciplinary teams of architects, urban planners, ecologists, engineers and landscape designers were enlisted by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and MoMA PS1 to envision new housing infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation, particularly in the country's suburbs. Drawing on ideas proposed in The Buell Hypothesis, a research publication prepared by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, each team focused on a specific location within a "megaregion" to come up with inventive solutions for the future of housing and cities. This publication presents each of these proposals (exhibited at MoMA in Spring 2012) in detail, through photographs, drawings and renderings as well as interviews with the team leaders. With texts by Barry Bergdoll, MoMA's Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Henry N. Cobb, a founding partner of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and Reinhold Martin, Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center, Foreclosed examines the relationship between land, infrastructure and urban form, exploring potential futures for America's extended metropolises.
Casabella, Volume 777. "Una casa sull' Hudson," By Joan Ockman. Gefter-Press House
included with Double Dihedral House and Glass House at 2 Degrees. Milan, Italy.
Photography by
Richard Barnes and Bilyana Dimitrova.
American Masterworks: Houses of the Twentieth & Twenty-first
Centuries by Kenneth Frampton and David Larkin. Gefter-Press House
included in collection. Rizzoli, New York
Photography by
Richard Barnes.
Currents | Books: 11 More Great Homes by Elaine Louie, The New York Times, January 7, 2009
New York: 2000, Architecture and Urbanism from the Bicentennial to the Millennium by Robert A.M. Stern, David Fishman, and Jacob Tilove The anthology and analysis of New York City presents Stateless Housing and urban design and planning for the New York City Department of Housing, Preservation and Development.
How We Live: Free and Clear By Karrie Jacobs. Gefter-Press House with RU 128 by Werner Sobek and Philip Johnson Glass House.
The Gefter-Press House is featured in Metropolis, January 2008 and online at Metroplis. Article by Stephen Zacks. Photography by Bilyana Dimirova.
The Glass House MoleskineSketchbook produced for Philip Johnson Glass House in 2008. Includes Gefter-Press House drawing.
Michael Bell interview by Andrew Benjamin; BOMB, New York; Summer 2004
Design Review: "Drop-Dead Beauty and Luxe, With an Intimate Index of Change" By Roberta Smith. Published: July 2, 1999
"It should be pointed out that there are exceptions to the general spare-no-expense atmosphere. Michael Bell's 900-square-foot ''Glass House @ 2degrees'' may resemble Philip Johnson's glass house, but it was designed to conform to the strict requirements of a Federal housing program for the Fifth Ward of Houston." "They are beautiful esthetic objects, but with the exception of Mr. Bell's glass house and possibly Mr. Denari's metal one, none could be a prototype for a larger community."
Glass House @ 2 Degrees, The Un-Private House, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
32 - Beijing / New York. Issue 1-7: founding editors Michael Bell, Steven Holl, Yung Ho Chang. Princeton Architectural Press.
The Houston Press: Not Your Standard Issue: Architects design one-of-a-kind houses for the Fifth Ward, trying to prove that even lower-end houses don't have to be a cookie-cutter box. By Lisa Gray. Published: November 9, 2000
