The Daniels Faculty is pleased to announce that Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu of the New York City-based practice SO-IL are the 2024-2025 Frank Gehry International Visiting Chairs in Architectural Design. 

Established in 2008, SO-IL explores “how the creation of environments and objects inspires lasting positive intellectual and societal engagement,” whether that involves working with existing structures or building from the ground up.

“Our interventions are both respectful of their pasts and adaptable to a dynamic future,” says the pair, whose awards have ranged from the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Prize in 2010 to this year’s ArchDaily Building of the Year Award in the housing category.

The ArchDaily award was given for 450 Warren, a multi-unit housing project in the formerly industrial Gowanus neighbourhood of Brooklyn (pictured below). 

Other residential projects by SO-IL include the Las Americas Social Housing prototype in Leon, Mexico (developed in 2016 and realized in 2021) and in-progress 9 Chapel Street (a multi-unit Brooklyn complex that “conceives of outdoor spaces as extensions of living areas”). 

A rendering of 9 Chapel, which is located at the corner of Chapel and Jay Streets in downtown Brooklyn, is pictured below.

“We feel extremely fortunate to have these visionary designers with us and look forward to the fresh perspectives they will bring to our program,” says Associate Professor Wei-Han Vivian Lee, director of the Faculty’s Master of Architecture (MARC) program.

“Their forward-thinking approach to housing design—reimagining domestic habits, community interactions and creative solutions in building materials and massing strategies—promises to offer our students exceptional insights.”

During their time at the Faculty, Idenburg and Liu will be teaching a studio, called Big Little Village, on the mixing of old and new in the context of domestic architecture.

In addition, the pair will deliver, on September 12, the first lecture of the Faculty’s 2024-2025 Public Programming series. The talk is called Urban Domesticity, an allusion to the title of their upcoming book, In Depth: Urban Domesticities Today. 

A corresponding exhibition, also opening September 12, will be held in the Faculty’s Larry Wayne Richards Gallery at 1 Spadina Crescent.

Named in honour of Frank O. Gehry, the Toronto-born designer of such iconic buildings as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Gehry Chair brings an international architect to the Faculty every year to deliver a public lecture and enrich the student learning experience. 

The endowed role was established in November 2000 by Indigo Books and Music founder Heather Reisman and 45 other donors; they contributed $1 million, which was matched by U of T.  

In recent years, previous Gehry Chairs have included Aljoša Dekleva and Tina Gregorič (2019-2020), Douglas Cardinal (2020-2021), Lina Ghotmeh (2021-2022) and Marina Tabassum (2022-2023).

For more information on SO-IL, click here.