The Firm | The Projects
Not many young architects find a dream job and work on fabulous projects immediately out of school. Lindy Roy worked in about 18 offices in her first two years after graduating, in the 1990 recession, with an M.Arch degree from Columbia University. “It was hell, just absolute hell. It was insane,” says Roy, who recently started her own small New York firm, ROY, and who has received some interesting commissions.

“It’s been more than 10 years since I graduated and only in the last two years do I see the shape of what it is that I’ve been pushing for all along,” Roy says. “It really takes time and luck.”

Roy grew up in South Africa and earned a B.Arch from the University of Cape Town. A fourth-year internship brought her to New York. “I’d wanted to leave South Africa from when I was a teenager. Growing up under Apartheid, I was never able to come to terms with living there,” says Roy. “When I came to New York, I realized this was exactly where I wanted to be.”

Although she was jumping around from office to office, Roy admits she had valuable, invigorating experiences with a few of the first architects she worked for, including Frank Israel in Los Angeles and Peter Eisenman in New York. She was one of the first female project managers in Eisenman’s office. “Working in Eisenman’s office for two years was an extraordinary experience because it was simultaneously hair-raising and fabulous,” Roy says.

Now with her own firm with a couple of full-time employees in an office in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, Roy is developing a portfolio of projects ranging from a single-family house to a health spa to an arts center installation and a nightclub. A constant in all her work is an exploration of possibilities with various materials in new and expanded contexts.

That exploration paid off in Roy’s competition-winning design for this year’s MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architect program. Materials include fabric enclosures and steel supports for hammocks in an installation called subWave, on view through August 31 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens, N.Y. With a metaphor of a weather map in plan (see previous page), the installation—complete with small pools, spray misters, places to lounge, and a wall of fans—is an environment for the art center’s summer festival.

One of her firm’s first large commissions was a spa in the safari country of Botswana (below). As with P.S.1, fabric enclosures were implemented to delineate spaces while maintaining transparency. “The spa project and P.S.1 have similar strategies of introducing elements of luxury, in spartan ways, in the environment—one being wild and one being urban,” Roy says.

Roy is currently completing design work on a house for developer Coco Brown [APRIL 2001, page 27] for his new Hamptons development, Sagaponac.

John E. Czarnecki, Assoc. AIA

The Projects | The Firm
Click photos to see more of each project.