League Prize 2015: mcdowellespinosa



The Architectural League Prize 2015
mcdowellespinosa
Seth McDowell and Rychiee Espinosa

Working from a storefront in Scottsville, VA and a brownstone in Brooklyn, NY, Seth McDowell and Rychiee Espinosa founded mcdowellespinosa in 2010 with attention to the “transformation of waste, excess, and the ordinary into new spatial and material realities.”

Influenced by Jacques Carelman’s Catalogue of Impossible Objects from 1969, which presents objects that question utility and offer solutions to seemingly irrelevant problems, mcdowellespinosa investigates the “unfindable.” The pair presents their principles of 3 Unfindable Constructs that test the rules of authenticity, manipulate materials, and explore “light and space, scale and structure.” The Anomalous Construct seeks to “produce variation in the sameness” through manipulation of a repetitive unit; the Syzygia Construct tests the fusion of opposing materials to find an alliance between them; and the Clinamen Construct explores “a principle of deviance” to “reposition the unfamiliar.”

To illustrate these constructs, McDowell and Espinosa present a series of recent projects, including Water Fuel, which proposes a Water Scooter Network for Manhattan powered by water converted to fuel through electrolysis; Geonachos, a material study of hot wax introduced to cold water; and My Hair is at MoMA PS1, which uses human hair waste as a building material.

For more information, visit archleague.org/LP15

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