P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

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P.S.1 Newspaper

2009 Fall

Ellinger/Yehia Design: Making it Real

Ellinger/Yehia Design competed as a finalist in the 2003 edition of YAP. Their entry consisted of multiple geometric arrangements of a classic construction element: the straight wooden line.

P.S.1: Where were you, as a firm, when you entered the YAP program?

Jefferson Ellinger and Nona Yehia, Ellinger/ Yehia Design: In 2003 we were just starting out as a firm, just the two of us. Jefferson was teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and they gave us a room that we could set up as a studio. The competition really gave us the mechanism from which to build an office. There were a bunch of students who wanted to work on the project so all of the sudden we were a pretty substantial entity— fifteen or twenty kids! Putting out a portfolio was just as big for us as the project. Never before had we gone back and edited our work to that extent. Putting it all together really legitimized our work. People who worked on the project stayed with us until just recently, so the competition was a real catalyst for us.

P.S.1: Was there something in the air that you were able to bring to the project?

E-Ye Design: The most interesting part of the project was testing out a digital process in a physical way by making full scale models and then putting them back into the digital design, and going back and forth. We were almost trying to position digital technologies into the project but more specifically moving towards the material and understanding how the material can influence the design. In a way, it was the precursor to the parametric kind of design we’re doing now.

P.S.1: It’s interesting that you view the YAP competition as a catalyst for your work. Can you tell us about those projects that succeeded later on?

E-Ye Design: We wanted to focus on maximizing the architectural process with very simple and even common construction technique. For us, that ended up being a straight wood element, essentially generating ruled surface geometries. We built three projects in total using this technique— two houses, including the W house in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

P.S.1: How did you approach the idea of an all-day concert with your design?

E-Ye Design: The project is open seven days a week and while P.S.1 is a music and event space on Saturday, most of the time it’s a museum. We really looked at how the project would be activated with just a few people walking through it as juxtaposed to Saturday’s WarmUp.

P.S.1: Did you attend any WarmUps?

E-Ye Design: Oh yeah! We’d seen both SHoP, Lindy Roy’s and Bill Massie’s projects the years before.

P.S.1: And your impressions...

E-Ye Design: P.S.1 has an innovative edge. People were engaging at all different levels—you could go to hang out and not really even pay attention to the architecture! When my son was just 3 months old we went and found a secluded spot to listen to the music. This idea of different scales of occupation was definitely something we thought about—how to mediate through a large crowd and find those isolated moments through the architecture.

P.S.1: You were both relatively young in age and career when you took part in YAP. How “youthfully” did you approach the project? E-Ye Design: You could say that we were guilty of over-reaching, but over-reaching in a good way. We didn’t have enough experience to know when we were doing a little too much and yes, we were caught up in the exuberance of wanting to do well. I think we’re still young architects. We have a long way to go.

This interview was conducted by Chris Barley and Troy Conrad Therrien, recent graduates of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. As students they collected an image archive and condicuted an oral history project on YAP for a seminar with Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA. They were asked to collaborate with P.S.1 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the program by organizing an exhibition of the images collected and offering their oral histories to be edited and published in the Summer 2009 P.S.1 Newspaper. They will continue this research as part of their on-going project, "Youth Value", on youth in architecture.