Marpillero Pollak Architects

Sandro Marpillero and Linda Pollak are both architects, educators, writers and design critics. Their combined experience and design expertise ranges from lighting to landscape architecture to urban design. A number of their essays are required reading for this course.

MP Architects current design projects include the Elmhurst Library Renovation and Expansion, Queens Plaza Public Spaces, New Stapleton Waterfront Park, and Staten Island Children’s Museum Lightweight Structures. Their completed projects have won awards from the AIA, ASLA, HUD and EDRA, and received support from the NEA, NYSCA and the Design Trust for Public Space.

See www.newyork-architects.com/mparchitects
[Be sure to click on the link under the "CITY" icon]

Sandro Marpillero, AIA, OdF
Marpillero began his architectural career in Italy in 1980. He later served as an Associate of a medium-size corporate firm; as president of a seven-person New York-based design company; and founder of an independent practice in 1990. In 1998, he and Pollak founded MPA. Within their design practice Marpillero contributes expertise in urban design and planning. Outside of the office, he is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Columbia University, where he has taught in the MSAUD program since 1994. He has also taught at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, University of Venice, University of Toronto, and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to being a contributor to LOTUS INTERNATIONAL and DIADALOS, he has served on their Board of Contributors and Editorial Board respectively. Marpillero is a graduate of the University of Venice and Columbia University.

Linda Pollak, AIA, ASLA Associate
Since the beginning of her design career, Pollak has sought to merge architectural and landscape architectural practices in theory and in built work. She is the co-author, with Anita Berrizbeitia, of INSIDE OUTSIDE: BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPE, which received a 2002 ASLA Award and is now in its second printing. Her essays on architecture and urban landscape have appeared in PRAXIS, DIADALOS, LOTUS INTERNATIONAL, PUBLIC ART ISSUES, and APPENDX, and in the book CASE: DOWNSVIEW. She is Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, on the Peer Review Board of the NYC Department of Design and Construction Design Excellence Program, and has served on the Editorial Board of DIADALOS and HARVARD ARCHITECTURE REVIEW, and been Project Editor for ASSEMBLAGE. Pollak taught the Harvard University Graduate School of Design from 1992-2004. She was the winner of the 2003-4 Arthur W. Brunner Rome Prize, as well as grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Graham Foundation.

Sandro Marpillero's essay "Apparatus v. Object," in CONSTELLATIONS: CONSTRUCTING URBAN DESIGN PRACTICES (2007), discusses MPA's urban design project for Queens Plaza, and is required reading for this course.

Linda Pollak's forthcoming essay "Matrix Landscape: Construction of Identity in the Large Park" is attached above (see symposium references). It is an excellent analysis of Field Operation's Fresh Kill Park plan which, as a case study, offers many ideas applicable to urban design (or landscape urbanism) and your immediate work in this studio.