Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/603573
"I still feel like nature and ecology figure very prominently in the DNA of who I am and what we do here, even though we don't necessarily practice at that scale all the time now." —Andrew Heid 000 CULTURED Andrew Heid's C.V. is about as top-flight as they come. After studying architecture at Yale, the Architectural Association in London and at Princeton, he worked at REX and OMA in New York and Rotterdam. He formed his own firm, NO Architecture, in 2009, when he was 29 years old. When asked what he and his staff do—in the broadest sense—he laughs, pauses, then replies, "That's a difficult question. Maybe another way to say it is, what are we not doing? We're not interested in a lot of things. We're not interested in this kind of profusion of materiality that Rem Koolhaas is interested in. We're not interested in the hyper-fetishization of the digital, which is what a lot of the contemporary, younger people are interested in." Among a long list of what does interest him are young Japanese architects such as Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata, Kazuyo Sejima ("a kind of a hero") and Ryue Nishizawa. "They're sort of untheoretical, but they have the most poetic, direct way of working. And what they're really working on, I think, is how to express the kind of interconnectedness we have in this postindustrial epoch or culture that we live in." Two early projects—an award-winning entry for New York's High Line park and a second for an "environmental restoration area" titled "This is Not a Park" in Berlin—show an early connection between Heid and those he admires. "I still feel like nature and ecology figure very prominently in the DNA of who I am and what we do here, even though we don't necessarily practice at that scale all the time now. At the scale of our practice, houses, particularly in the countryside, are where we can do interesting work." One such project (arguably his most personal) was the house he commissioned for his parents. It was inspired, in part, by his design thesis at Princeton: a make-believe hotel and restaurant in New York's Hudson Valley. It consisted of a single-level, cantilevered 262 CULTURED Heid's design for a weekend home in the Berkshires frames mountain views through a series of interconnected pavilions.