New York architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi founded their studio, Weiss/Manfredi, in 1989 after winning a couple of important competitions—for the Military Women's Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery and Olympia Fields and Community Center near Chicago—both were built in the 1990s. Their most representative built works include the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center, Hunter's Point South Waterfront Park, and the Barnard College Diana Center, all in New York City. The architects' Seattle Museum of Art's Olympic Sculpture Park, which won an international competition and was built in 2007, was praised by critics as one of the world's greatest sculpture parks and among the best examples of landscape urbanism.
The studio's current projects include La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles, the expansion of the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida, and the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India. Among many honors, the firm received the 2024 Louis Kahn Award, the 2020 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture, and the 2018 Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Institution's National Design Award. Their distinguished work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim, Louvre, and Venice Biennale. The studio's most recent, almost 500-page monograph, DRIFTING SYMMETRIES and Other Enduring Models, will be released by Park Books later this month.
In our video interview last April, the architects spoke about their upbringings (Marion in the Bay Area and Michael in Rome), reasons for going into architecture, and seminal figures in their education, including Ralph Lerner, James Stirling, and Colin Rowe. The partners met at the office of Romaldo 'Aldo' Giurgola; they talked in detail about that experience and what they took from it. The architects discussed their early competition projects that were fundamental for starting their practice together. They spoke at length about the philosophy behind their architecture, particularly reciprocity between landscape and architecture and such desirable qualities as ambiguity and hybridity.
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The partners cited Spanish Steps in Rome, land art, Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses, and the context wherever they work as fundamental inspirations for their architecture. They spoke about their design process and discussed such projects as the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Hunter's Point South Waterfront Park, the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, and, of course, the firm's most celebrated project, Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle. They emphasized the increasing urgency of addressing the environmental crisis with poetic and unique solutions. In conclusion, the architects asserted positively, "With extraordinary urgencies come extraordinary opportunities."
