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Studio ST: From inside to the ground up |
When Israeli architect Esther Sperber left Pei Partnership Architects to strike out on her own with Studio ST in 2003, she was excited, nervous, and up to the challenge. “Having the opportunity to work so closely with Mr. Pei was amazing,” she says. “It felt like we were dealing with the end of High Modernism. I knew it was a gamble to start my own firm, but I was interested in trying something new, and putting into practice some of the technologies I had learned in school.” That was Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, which Sperber attended after moving to New York from Jerusalem in 1997. “There was a huge emphasis in doing those crazy computer-generated blobs when I was there,” she says. “The blobs weren’t that interesting to me, but the technology was. I’m very interested in expanding the pallet of forms, construction methods, and ways of making spaces, as a means of allowing a better focus to try to create places and spaces for human activity and interaction.”
Mediatheque, Carnoux-en-Provence, France, unbuilt A modern library (above) where a bookshelf/wall of stacked glass-and-concrete blocks links inside and out.
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Sperber spent her first year on her own sharing an office with another young firm, dZO, and the two practices collaborated on a number of international competition submissions. “Competitions are refreshing and fun,” she says. “Though there’s a side to them that’s a little exploitative, they’re an opportunity to think through design challenges.” After that first year, word of mouth got Sperber interior renovation jobs, and she has been able to put her philosophies and expertise into action ever since, as her two-person firm now has a roster of high-end residential renovations completed or under way, as well as new construction projects for real estate developers. While she enjoys the high-end residential projects’ big budgets, she’s excited about her latest ground-up projects, including a private house in New Jersey. “It’s a small budget, but with clients who are very open to new ideas. And working with a tighter budget forces you to focus on simplicity, space and light, and efficient proportions.”
Efficiency is a big part of Sperber’s design philosophy, which is where her love of new technology comes in. “When anything is cut by a computer-generated machine, you can use smaller pieces and save materials and time,” she says, referring to a home project in Atlanta, Georgia, currently in design called the Slice House, where she will use precut and prewired structurally insulated panels that are attached to one another and don’t require additional stick framing. The home will also have everything in place to easily add photovoltaic panels if and when the client decides to take the next step with sustainability.
For Sperber, the next step personally is taking a few months off to have a baby, which she admits is not easy to schedule when you run your own very small firm. With as many projects as she has in the works, however, she’ll be back in the office soon. “There’s nothing like the smell of wet concrete,” she says, “so I know I won’t be away from the joy of making buildings for long.”Subscribe to Get Free Architectural Record newsletter | Architectural Record in print | Back Issues | Manage your subscription | Get Architectural Record digitally
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