OFFICE PROFILE
e+i studio, is a dynamic architecture and design practice based in New York City headed by Eva Perez de Vega and Ian Gordon. First founded informally in 2007 as ‘e+i architecture’ through a collaborative design-build research project that helped define our approach to the practice (Choreographing Space), and formally established in 2010 as ‘e+i studio LLC’ to encompass the varied work we are interested in; from public projects that engage the city and the environment, to residential and commercial renovations, to set and product design including furniture and jewelry.
The practice has often aimed to engage in projects that address issues of the body and movement in space as well as experiments in material and aesthetic effects. This has brought frequent collaborations with dancers to develop collaborative projects that become singular fusions of movement and architectural investigations.
The work of e+i has been supported and awarded by the New York Foundation For the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Manhattan Council Art Fund, Architecture For Humanity and Emerging New York Architects, among others. It has been exhibited in New York at the AIA Center for Architecture, Van Alen Institute, Max Protech, RIVAA art gallery, Parsons New School For Design, as well as internationally at the Milan design fair, Venice, Rome, Madrid, Stockholm and Seoul.
PARTNER BIO’S
Eva Perez de Vega is an architect, designer, choreographer and educator. She holds a Masters and Bachelors degree in Architecture and Civil Engineering from the University of Madrid, School of Advanced Architecture (ETSAM), and is a Masters in Philosophy candidate at the New School For Social Research.
Prior to co-founding e+i studio, Eva was lead design architect at Reiser + Umemoto, and later, while expanding her earlier dance training in New York City, founded EPdVS Studio, a multidisciplinary design practice aimed at exploring techniques of exchange between architecture and other disciplines such as dance.
She is adjunct assistant professor at Parsons the New School For Design, where she has been teaching architecture and design since 2004, and has previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton School of Architecture. She has also been an invited guest critic at Pratt, Columbia, NJIT, City College and Princeton. Eva has also lectured on her work and teaching at a variety of venues and conferences. She was recently invited for the second time to present her theoretical work at the Architecture and Philosophy conference held in Boston.
Originally from Rome, Italy; she lives and works in New York City.
Ian Gordon is a licensed architect in New York State with experience working in New York, North Carolina, and Madrid, Spain. Prior to co-foudning e+i studio, Ian worked as an architect for Studio Daniel Libeskind for five years, and previously acquired professional experience working for various offices in New York and abroad.
He received his Master’s Degree in Advanced Architectural Design (AAD) and graduated with honors from Columbia University. He holds a Bachelors degree from NC State University and has a background in Fine Arts from Temple University's Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania.
He has taught at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture and currently teaches at Parsons The New School For Design and New York City Tech. He manages the e+i blog where he further explores issues of how the built environment interfaces with computational methodologies.
Originally from Manila, Philippine’s, he lives and works in New York City.
e+i OFFICE STATEMENT
Informed by our background in movement related practices we approach architecture as an interdisciplinary practice that emerges from the exploration of the performance of matter and bodies in space. For us, architecture is a material manifestation of choreographed space. In other words, we seek to propose solutions that engage performative movement-based expression and architectural spatial constructs into proposals that are not fixed in time, but can evolve through performance and use.
The spaces of our built environment become more tangible through movement in and around them; engaging and being engaged with them and the environment that they share. Yet historically Architecture has largely been conceived of, and materialized through statistic models that deal more with the idea of permanence and stability than that of dynamics and movement. Our work is aimed at challenging these inert models of organization, in order to explore new ways of operating on our environment with deeper investigations on our present and future patterns of living.
Our practice is imbued with the view that architectural spaces generated from a dynamic perspective have the potential for producing a fundamentally different architecture, capable of learning from and integrating other disciplines and areas of knowledge.