Ibañez Kim Studio is the office of Mariana Ibañez and Simon Kim, interested in a destabilized practice of design, where dynamic networks replace a single authority.
Ibañez Kim Studio was established in 2007 in London, England where the principals met at the Architectural Association. Since then Ibañez Kim Studio has enjoyed a heterogenous practice in multiple scales and events. Their first projects were a large retrofit of an artist’s studio in Regent’s Park, a Knightsbridge salon, and a drawing room for a rabbi in North London.
Currently with offices in Philadelphia and Boston, Ibañez Kim Studio continues its investigations into design, architecture, and cities with projects ranging from experimental short films, wearable architecture, and interactive masterplanning: a small space-navigation device was exhibited in Cambridge, MA, and an operable clothing/cladding system went to Milan Fashion Week. The firm has designed a villa in Inner Mongolia, a tensile membrane structure for the National Art Museum of China, and a pavilion in Lexington, Massachusetts, and were recently selected by MoMA for their PS1 program.
In every project, Ibañez Kim Studio seeks to exploit inequalities in perceived wisdom and radicality, maintained with determination that the result come out with every intricacy and nuance. Clean geometries and strict systems have been corrupted or probed for instability in every effort to find the true nature of technique and its relationship to design.
MARIANA IBAÑEZ
is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She teaches in the architecture core design studio sequence.
An Argentinean architect and designer, she graduated from the University of Buenos Aires with a Bachelor of Architecture Before attending the Architectural Association in London for her Master of Architecture, she was one of the principals of FIV Architectura, a firm that focused on the design and construction of ephemeral structures for performance spaces.
Her thesis work at the AA focuses on the issue of responsive environments through the implementation of adaptive structures and interphases. The project has been exhibited at the Delft Institute of Technology, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and the International Biennale of Architecture in Beijing. Reference to this work can be found in publications like AD, Archicreation and Icon magazine.
Mariana has been a guest critic at the AA, MIT, RISD and other institutions since 2004 and previously taught Design Studio from 1999 to 2002 at the University of Buenos Aires where she had received her Bachelor of Architecture.
After her graduate studies, she joined the Advanced Geometry Unit at ARUP before going to the office of Zaha Hadid where she developed several projects as well as leading the design for the London Aquatic Centre for the 2012 Olympic Games.
SIMON KIM, AIA
is Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design, and a Registered Architect. After graduating from the Design Research Laboratory at the Architectural Association, he was a designer and project architect for the Office of Zaha Hadid, and a consultant to Gehry Technologies. Simon is visiting faculty at Yale this semester, and has taught studios and seminars at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the AA.
Simon's recent research has been an engagement with electronic devices, dynamic environments and urban space as a continually mediated and perceptual frame. His post-graduate work at MIT was on cybernetics, machines, architecture, and their translated design experiences through interfaces.
Simon has presented his research at conferences on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, and Cybernetic Science and Systems Research.
Simon is Director of the Immersive Kinematics Research Group
