Portfolio at NYU

Posted 04.16.03
Architecture In Vitra, An Academic Steals the Showroom

By Elizabeth Varnell

South African architect Lindy Roy's ideas all break down into a series of elements, or as she calls them, "programs." Her proposals are rife with meticulously planned horizontal integration. She spins off new ideas and slick marketable accessories each time she revisits renderings of her own designs. And two months before Monica Lewinsky's HBO confessional at Cooper Union, Roy took center stage to emphasize this translation of theoretical ideas into concrete reality by showcasing her student's end-of-semester project.

"As theorists, we place emphasis on dynamics at play," Roy says, pointing at a huge spherical shape made of plywood, fiberglass, screws, bolts, and anything else available in an architecture school's workroom. The sphere represents the movement, sights, space, time, and layers experienced on a New York subway ride. "But," she maintains, "As architects, we have to create ideas in real space and translate theoretical ideas into reality." So her students created spin-off "programs" to accompany the structure. Slick flip books of images, slide shows, and films document lighting patterns, layers of experience, signs, and interactions between spaces.

But unlike Ms. Lewinsky, Roy does not have time on her hands. This summer, her firm will begin work on four structures in the U.S. and the plans for three others in Louisiana, Alaska, and Botswana will be under way.

And Vitra, the German furniture manufacturers recently tapped the towering redhead for their new Manhattan showroom in the meatpacking district. She will create an interior for the showroom and retail space slated to open this summer. For the last two decades, Vitra (best known for creating modern furniture by Panton, Eames, Bellini and Van Severen), has given carte blanche to impulsive young architects, entrusting its retail design stores and office buildings to relatively unknown innovators. The list includes marquee names like Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Sevil Peach, Tadao Ando, and Antonio Citterio. Designing for Vitra has become a rite of passage for a generation of architects.

Roy, 37, is fast becoming a presence in the New York architecture scene. Last summer she was selected to transform the outdoor playground of P.S. 1, a MoMA affiliate in Queens, from a concrete courtyard to a misty oasis. Contestants had to submit plans for a structure that could be built in three months for $50,000. "Architecture is usually so slow, converting an idea to a building takes years. Here, we went from an idea to opening day in three months!" says Roy. Her courtyard ecosystem, or "urban oasis," as she calls it, was an intricate arrangement of pools, hammocks, and a wall of fans that spritzed visitors with atomized water. The proposed "program" also incl
uded spa watches and hanging pouches for water storage designed for sale on the site (but manufacturers couldn't keep pace with Roy's speedy imagination).

The Vitra commission—a 12,100 square foot showroom on Ninth Avenue—is only blocks from Roy's Manhattan office, which is located around the corner from the trendy French bistro, Pastis. "It will not only be our first showroom, but our first completed Manhattan installation," Roy says. "The building," she adds, "a turn of the century, raw industrial space, has great bone structure." Roy did not submit renderings for the project. The German furniture manufacturers simply chose her on the basis of her past work. Imagine the marketable accessories her "program" for this commission might include. Regulars at this month's International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York may have to revisit Vitra later this summer to find the real innovations.

And she has been attracting favorable attention from critics. New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp has said that if Roy doesn't have a future in New York, architecture doesn't have a future in New York. That's just fine for Roy who calls herself an "absolute city girl" who also loves the extremes. "One half of me loves the city and the other half likes to be in the middle of nowhere," she adds, recalling childhood adventures in the wilds of South Africa.

Roy grew up there and earned a B.Arch from the University of Cape Town. She added an M.Arch at Columbia five years later. As a child she roamed the outdoors, imagining structures that blended into the vast African landscapes. But from an early age, she had her eye on New York. "I'd always wanted to leave South Africa from when I was a teenager," says Roy. "I couldn't live with Apartheid, and when I came to New York, I knew this was where I should be." Ironically, Roy credits New York for inspiring her far-flung creations and for pushing her to choosing new materials and innovative projects over placid renovations and stately homes.

Her solution to her split personality is a variation on the bicoastal regime of movie starlets: "My office is in New York and I design for tourists in the bush. To arrange one's life to be able to do both, be in a remote spot and in the middle of everything at various times, is fantastic. The politics of a space really means something to me. In South Africa, politics literally determined everything about where one could go based on one's race and background. To me, it's not an abstract notion."

And Roy is attracting clients who share her obsession with space. In addition to the Vitra showroom, scheduled to open this summer, ROY'S four-person team is currently designing an "extreme" ski hotel in Alaska (built in an X configuration in order to accommodate three adjoining heliports), commissioned by an extreme skier. Simultaneously, the firm is finishing plans for a pool house, their contribution to real estate investor Harry "Coco" Brown Jr.'s Houses at Sagaponac development project, a Hamptons residential space designed to stave off burgeoning mega-mansions. Brown recruited architect Richard Meier (of Getty Center fame) to recruit 33 other architects who created single-family "designer subdivisions" ranging in price from $800,000 to $2.5 million. Also in the works is a Cycling Circuit Barn in upstate New York—a 1870s guesthouse that will be will be updated with a bicycle path running inside and out. The family's six and four-year-old children won't have to dismount their bikes to enter the house, cruise through the kitchen, and zoom out the back door to the pool area.

Roy's eco-designs span the globe. She's working on a revitalization of the Mississippi River's "Cancer Alley," and a luxury eco-spa, which will float in Botswana's Okavango River Delta. Her eco-tourism projects will be featured in the "New Hotels for Global Nomads" show opening on October 29 at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum.

Roy's trademark—using natural technologies and materials native to her construction sites—appeals to her clients. Entrepreneur and self-described weekend warrior Robert Rubin, who commissioned the heliski lodge in Alaska's Chugach Range, says these extreme aspects of Roy's designs immediately attracted his attention. "The location of this project," Rubin says, "raises serious logistical issues for fabrication and transport of the steel parts—likely to be made in Seattle and barged up to Alaska—so we are studying what's around Alaska, what kind of prefab "pop-ins" could be had from other really cold places like Sweden or Greenland, and how they might be adapted to our structure." Roy's team will create rooms that effectively pop into the superstructure—like the famous Corb analogy of wine bottles fit into the rack for l'United'Habitation de Marseille—allowing for easy expansion over time. One can only guess what the "program" for this project will be, but Roy has dropped some clues. "The hotel is wild, it's got this whole paramilitary thing to it [think last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer], and it's extreme on every level—everything has to be consolidated and designed for three elements: cold, height, and speed."