Inspired by Midcentury: WXY Studio is part 3 of a 5-part series featured in our July 2019 Special Edition newsletter.

WXY is an award-winning multi-disciplinary practice specializing in the realization of urban design, planning and architectural solutions in challenging contexts. Focused on innovative approaches to public space, structures and urban issues, the firm’s work engages both site-specific design and planning at multiple scales. The firm’s commissions are in collaboration with community-based, public authority, and private clients.

Here, WXY tells a visual story of how their work has taken inspiration from two European modernists, bookended on one side by an example of early modernism from Adolf Loos, and on the other by the last work Le Corbusier completed before his death in 1965. 

Our renovations and additions to the 1960’s Deepwood House, designed by its original owner, took inspiration from a number of freestanding houses by Adolph Loos. The renowned Villa Müller (Prague, 1930) was a strong influence both for the anthropomorphic quality of its street facade and for demonstrating Loos’ Raumplan approach, a theory of spatial organization that avoids the traditional stacked floor levels in favor of interconnected, multi-level spaces, which provided inspiration here for imposing a new stair to connect a group of rooms on different levels. The Villa Moller, built in 1928 in Austria, was a reference point for the power of its blank walls, working in situ to make the primary experience spatial over the visual reading of the architecture. 

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The Centre Le Corbusier – Heidi Weber Museum, now known as the Pavillon Le Corbusier, is a steel and glass structure located in a public park in Zurich, Switzerland. It has served as an architectural inspiration for WXY Studio's work – its cubist sensibility to graphics, street, and plaza impact, are directly linked to this pavilion prototype in Downtown Brooklyn.