Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/603573
"I am 95 percent psychoanalyst and five percent architect." —Isay Weinfeld aking architecture involves a kind of ineffable magic. Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld prefers to leave it undefined. It is opening day of the sales office for the New York City condominium Jardim, and the development's author and I are lounging in the pretend dining room portion of the office's model home. I've asked Weinfeld to comment on his much-celeb rated curiosity. "There are just some things we don't know," he says, adding with some apology, "I am not the kind of person who will make up a big statement for you to have a better story." If you are not familiar with Weinfeld, the comment might call to mind the stereotypical architect, posing like a cabalist and manipulating the press. The association would be warranted, too, in light of the magnificent body of work that the São Paulo–based talent has been amassing since 1973. Single-family São Paulo houses like Sumaré House—a composition of rectilinear concrete volumes that appears weightless—and Casa Cubo—whose Brazilian ironwood–clad spiral staircase is suspended just above the floor—interpret the rigorous shapes and engineering innovations of classic Modernism through a South American lens. More public commissions, like the Minneapolis office tower or the residential 360º Building in São Paulo, translate historical modernism into skyscraper vernacular. The first is raised on a veritable forest of mirrored pillars, and the second is a stack of boxes whose various shifts and rotations create interstices filled with gardens. Such accomplishments would earn anyone the right to dismiss a question from the ink-stained class. But the real Weinfeld is most emphatically not a mystic, nor an egotist. He vocally laments architects who think they have all the answers, which are inevitably "ruined" by a client's feedback. Weinfeld himself avoids prescriptions and relies heavily on collaboration, instead. "I am 95 percent psychoanalyst and five percent architect," he says of his alternative approach to the craft, "For me the most important thing is to listen to the person who has hired me." Indeed, Weinfeld starts our sales-office conversation by noting that he takes on new clients that, in addition to pushing his curiosity button, promise a pleasant working experience. Weinfeld's architecture is built on dialogue rather than the type of lone-man declarations that generate headlines. To be completed by early 2017, Jardim is Weinfeld's inaugural commission in New York. Erecting the pair of 11-story buildings on American soil has not required Weinfeld to reveal his methodology—"This is not like Lee Strasberg and I'll walk the streets of New York for six months," he says—but watching the project take shape offers Weinfeld's new audience a glimpse into a mind whose owner would rather not parse its inner workings. With Jardim, Weinfeld gave much consideration to the site and was excited by the prospect of his first New York City building, a mid-block location in West Chelsea: Zaha Hadid's mid-rise condo—also forthcoming—and the High Line occupy the two slots immediately to Jardim's east. Additionally the Jardim property spans two city streets, which Weinfeld says required a north–south right of way. In turn, "We designed a tunnel that connects one street to the other one, and put the entrance for the two buildings in the middle of this tunnel." The entire ground floor area serves as a single-story, U-shaped plinth for the towers, an eastern buffer between Hadid's swirls and a composition reminiscent of Gropius and Mendelsohn—and is one layer in a Babylonian scheme where gardens stretch from courtyard to rooftop. Jardim illustrates another aspect of Weinfeld's practice, which has gotten as much attention as his curiosity. The architect began his creative career as a filmmaker (Time Out London's announcement of his first film ranks among his two most treasured memories) and the way he orchestrates future homeowners' arrival at Jardim is one of its more palpably cinematic moments. "The way I move you inside the project, where you should enter, what you see, this is very similar to what a filmmaker does with the audience," he says of creating a sequence more time-consuming and evocative than merely passing into a street front lobby. 248 CULTURED M