Winka Dubbeldam is a Dutch-American architect and academic. After her education in architectural design at Columbia University, she established her own firm, Archi-Tectonics, in 1994 in New York City. Her use of a combination of sustainable materials, innovative and inventive building methods with adoption of digital techniques has rewarded her with many accolades for her architectural projects. She has earned a reputation as a leading figure in modern architectural designs which has also made her "a real estate newsmaker". She was a Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. Her debut venture in building design was a residential house whose exhibits were displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, and Esquire magazine named her "Best and Brightest" in 2004. Her designs have also been exhibited in the Venice Biennale.
Biography
Dubbeldam was born in 1966 in the Netherlands. Her father headed a Dutch organization connected with police and fire services. After her initial schooling in the Netherlands, she studied architecture at the Institute of Higher Professional Architectural Education, Rotterdam, in 1990 and obtained a Master of Architecture degree. She then moved to New York in 1990 to study architecture at the Columbia University where the digital revolution in architecture was in a nascent state of evolution. She obtained her Master of Architecture Degree in Advanced Architectural Design from this university in 1992. From 1992 to 1994 she worked with Peter Eisenman on projects which she termed as "investigations". She then established her own firm in New York, Archi-Tectonics, in 1994 and since then has been engaged in designing commercial and residential projects. Dubbeldam, tall, generally attired in black, resides in her house which has black walls, with interior furnishings in black and white with tinge of purple shade.
Projects
Some of the key projects handled by Dubbeldam and her firm Archi-Tectonics are: The Greenwich Building and V33 building in New York City; the Ports1961 group "retail store" in Paris, London and Shanghai; the American Loft tower in Philadelphia, a 14 floor building of area, completed in 2009, which has 40 residential flats; a "pro-bono" design in Monrovia, Liberia for an orphanage for the MacDella Cooper Foundation and school in Liberia, and a design-research project for Downtown Bogota Liberia built with indigenous material like bamboo mats woven into the walls and hollow concrete blocks; the Yulin Design in China; the "breathing" Holon Tower premiered in Paris and presented the "Augmented Reality" at the Gallery R'Pure in New York; the GW497 building with 11 floors covering an area of with a frontage of folded glass curtain wall said to be the first "parametric design" developed by 3-D computer model; the Abu Dhabi Central Plaza Project completed in 2009 with a 50-floor hotel tower and 55-floor office tower; and the Aida's House of Beauty built in a narrow space in Manhattan with a blue-stone facade with an area of with "scissors-and-comb motif" on the salon's facade. Her firm won the "Design Competition for a Sustainable Neighborhood and Farmers Market" on Staten Island, New York. Another interesting project Dubbeldam designed is for the National Building Museum's 2004 exhibition on the theme of masonry variations. For this project she adopted materials like bricks, lightweight concrete blocks, stone and terrazo for the structural components. The exhibit was created by her, like the other three architects who were also assigned this task. She created a "fluid concrete gorge", like the Buckskin Gulch at Utah's Paria canyon. She adopted advanced digital analysis for the chamber in which it was built and the concrete was evolved with a fourth dimension by hanging speakers above the irregular shape of concrete which panned the surfaces. The "scrambled sound waves reorganized as they hit any surface and thus emitted unusual pulses that bounced off and around the shapes, converting the entire assembly into an extraordinary, almost theatrical phantasmagorical sound garden".
Awards
Dubbeldam is recipient of the "Emerging Voice" award, 2001, the IIDA / Metropolis Smart Environments Award, 2006.
Publications
Dubbeldam's published monographs are the Winka Dubbeldam, Architect published by 010 Publishers, Rotterdam in 1996, and the AT-INdex published by Princeton Press, New York in 2006. These have been republished in many international journals.
Exhibitions
Dubbeldam has participated in exclusive exhibitions in Form Zero Gallery in Los Angeles during 1994, in the Kunsthal in Rotterdam in 1996, in the Frederieke Taylor Gallery under the title "From HardWare to SoftForm" in Chelsea, New York in 2002, and the Art & Idea Gallery in Mexico City during 2004. Her firm participated in the exhibitions of the Museum of Modern Art such as "The Unprivate House" in 1999 and the "Young Architects" in 2001, and the "Max Protetch Exhibit" for a project of the World Trade Center in 2001, which was part of the Venice Biennale in 2002. Archi-tectonics also took part in the Venice Biennale "Arsenale exhibit" during 2004. She was the curator of The Progressive Architecture Network, which was exhibited in the Taylor Gallery during October–November 2006.
