Bio
Matthias Hollwich
Matthias Hollwich is the co-founder of Hollwich Kushner (HWKN), a New York City based architecture and concept design firm. The office deploys targeted research and fast-footed development to create innovative and responsible projects that exist at the intersection of client, user, and nature.
Current projects include a retirement village for priests in Cote d'Ivoire, 2 large-scale apartment renovations on New York's Upper East Side, the Favella Formiga Open Air Theater in Rio de Janeiro, and ongoing work with the Obama Administration on the rehabilitation of the Sasha Bruce House in Washington DC. In the Fall of 2008 the firm's award winning vision of urbanism, MEtreePOLIS, was featured in the German Pavillion at the Venice Biennale. This year, HWKN developed the website ARCHITIZER, a social networking platform connecting architects via their designs. Before co-founding HWKN, he worked in several internationally acclaimed architectural firms and urban design studios, including: OMA, Rotterdam (Netherlands), Eisenman Architects, and Diller+Scofidio, New York City. In 2001 he founded XPEKT, a concept-engineering firm based in Amsterdam.
From 1999-2001, Hollwich was assistant professor at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Switzerland 1999 - 2001 and part of the Bauhaus Dessau Werkstaedte between 2002 and 2006. In 2004 he finished editing his first book with Rainer Weisbach at the Bauhaus: UmBauhaus - Updating Modernism. He most recently took part in the PICNIC lecture series in Amsterdam and is a contributor to the forthcoming IBA 2010 Urban Redevelopment program for the Dessau region.
He is currently working with the University of Pennsylvania on a series of courses and symposia to reinvent nursing home design.
Encyclopædia Britannica Articles
- architecture
Art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. The practice of architecture emphasizes spatial relationships, orientation, the support of activities to be carried out within a designed environment, and the arrangement and visual rhythm of structural elements, as opposed to the design of structural systems themselves (see civil engineering). Appropriateness, uniqueness, a sensitive and innovative response to functional requirements, and a sense of place within its surrounding physical and social context distinguish a built environment as representative of a culture's architecture. See also building construction.
- architecture on britannica.com
- urban planning
Programs pursued as a means of improving the urban environment and achieving certain social and economic objectives. Evidence of urban planning can be found in the ruins of ancient cities, including orderly street systems and conduits for water and sewage. During the Renaissance, European city areas were consciously planned to achieve circulation of the populace and provide fortification against invasion. Such concepts were exported to the New World, where William Penn, in founding the city of Philadelphia, developed the standard gridiron plan—the laying out of streets and plots of land adaptable to rapid change in land use. Modern urban planning and redevelopment arose in response to the disorder and squalor of the slums created by the Industrial Revolution. The urban planner best known for his transformation of Paris was Georges-Eugène Haussmann. City planners imposed regulatory laws establishing standards for housing, sanitation, water supply, sewage, and public health conditions, and introduced parks and playgrounds into congested city neighbourhoods. In the 20th century, zoning—the regulation of building activity according to use and location—came to be a key tool for city planners. See also Pierre-Charles L'Enfant.
- urban planning on britannica.com
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