New home for Williams College Museum of Art

Florian Idenburg, co-founder of SO-IL, will give a talk on the architecture firm’s plans to design and build WCMA’s new home in Williamstown.

The presentation will begin at 6 p.m. at the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance, with a reception at 5 p.m., and will include an historical overview of the museum’s evolution as a building type, touching on the drivers that have changed our thinking and how to design a museum for the future. Idenburg also will discuss some of SO-IL’s previous work.

SO-IL was founded by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu and has been based in New York City since 2008. Diverse in origin, SO-IL’s team of collaborators speaks a dozen languages and is informed by global narratives and perspectives. They are both locally-rooted and nationless, coming together as a mid-size, well-recognized company. With their ambitious private and public clients, they explore how the creation of environments and objects inspires lasting positive intellectual and societal engagement.

They have completed projects in Leon, Seoul, and Lisbon, as well as their hometown, Brooklyn, New York. Their concept home for nomadic living in Milan encourages an active awareness of life beyond routine. At the University of California, Davis campus, they designed a museum that cultivates an intentionally open-ended relationship between the visitor and the site at the outset. They design with time in mind. Whether working with existing structures or building from the ground, they carefully investigate physical properties and history.

They have been featured in the New York Times, CNN, and Frankfurter Allgemeine. Their work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Their team has received numerous accolades, including the Vilcek Award, the Curbed Groundbreakers Award, and the MoMAPS1 Young Architects Program Award.