Bryan Young
Assistant Professor Adjunct
Young Projects LLC is a design studio founded by Bryan Young in New York City in 2010, whose work includes buildings, interiors, objects, material prototyping and furniture. Geometry, pattern, texture and spatial complexity play a significant role in creating an ambiguous architecture. The studio explores a variety of methods: breaking traditional techniques for fabrication, hand pulling plaster, growing crystals and burning things, to name a few.
Current projects include a 30,000sf ground-up Hospitality Retreat in the Dominican Republic, a five story 50,000sf mixed-use project in Brooklyn with two floors of co-working space and a museum as the anchor tenant, multiple houses, gut renovations and arts-and-crafts projects for children. In 2018, Noah Marciniak became a partner in the office, bringing a unique dedication to researching construction technology and a new consideration of material detailing.
Young Projects’ work has been widely published and has received numerous awards including The Architectural League of New York’s League Prize in 2013, a Progressive Architecture (P/A) Award from Architect Magazine for Glitch House in 2018, an Architizer A+ Award for the 2014 Times Square Heart installation, a “Best of Design” award from The Architect’s Newspaper in 2015 for the Gerken Residence, a “New Practices New York” award from AIA NY in 2016, an AN Award for the MALI Museum proposal in 2017, an Azure Award for "Best New Interior Product" for the pulled plaster panels in 2017. In 2018 and 2019, the firm was included in AN Interior’s annual list of the top 50 interior architects.
Bryan Young received his Master of Architecture with distinction from Harvard University in 2003, where he was awarded the AIA Henry Adams Medal and the Thesis Prize for his spatial diagrams on Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. He received his Bachelor of Arts with highest honors from UC Berkeley in 1997. Since 2009 he has taught graduate-level architecture design studios and seminars at several universities including MIT, Columbia, Parsons and Syracuse. Prior to establishing his studio, Young was a senior associate at Allied Works Architecture and previously worked at ARO, SOM and Peter Pfau.
View Bryan Young's full CV here.
Projects
Gerken Residence | Tribeca, New York
The Gerken Residence occupies 6,000 interior square feet and 1,500 square feet of roof garden on the top two floors (13 and 14) and roof of a historic Tribeca building. The proposal explores shifting relationships of solid and void through the interplay of three distinct nested prisms. At the entrance to the loft, a large courtyard opens the interior to the landscape, sky and city. This initial void is subsequently revealed to be bounded by a larger cut through the 14th floor, allowing the courtyard to be read as a floating glass mass, bridging the east and west sides of the plan, and opening the section between floors. The larger cut also exposes the existing building core as a monolithic mass that grounds the choreography of void and solid dancing around it. This core is clad in custom pulled plaster panels, a technique developed through the controlled collision of a centuries-old fabrication technique with contemporary digital design language. The project is formally restrained, but spatially provocative.
Glitch House | Playa Grande, Dominican Republic
Located further inland from the Lodge nestled into the jungle’s canopy is the Glitch House at the Retreat. The building consists of 1,800 interior square feet and 330 square feet of accessible roof garden. The House contains 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, as well as communal living areas. The exterior features cement tiles hand made in the Dominican Republic. The graphic pattern applied to its surface interferes with the legibility of the concrete block geometry of the house relative to the background of the tropical landscape. The Glitch House is the first structure a guest sees upon arriving at the Wellness Retreat. Rather than marking this moment with a defined boundary or gate house, the Glitch House strangely smears itself into the jungle landscape. It is a hint towards the immersive experiences that guides the design for the Retreat in general.
The Beach Spa | Playa Grande, Dominican Republic
The Beach Spa sits adjacent to the Lodge, nestled partially below grade as a unified collection of 6 rock-like masses. The Spa program includes an open-air massage space, steam and outdoor showers, underground sauna, cold plunge pool and an air conditioned treatment room. The interstitial space between masses provides circulation to the various programs. The geometry of the Spa is broadly suggestive of formations like naturally eroded rock or strange ruins. A closer reading reveals a carefully controlled unification of the 6 discrete volumes via inverting readings of symmetry, continuity, alignment, tangency and a singular architectural cropping envelope that bounds the entirety of the program. The sparkling concrete of the forms is embedded with green quartz aggregate that is willfully revealed in areas by sandblasting. Deep scraping in the concrete adds an additional layer of texture and relates to areas of runoff from pooling water on the roofs. Together, the additional concrete color and texture serve to reinforce the shifting reading of the volumes instigated by the geometry itself.
The Lodge | Playa Grande, Dominican Republic
Located on an undeveloped site in the Dominican Republic, the Lodge at Playa Grande is designed to take full advantage of the pristine beach scape at the front of the property, balancing expansive views of the Atlantic Ocean with the experience of the lush, dense jungle that dominates the majority of the site. The Lodge is one of five structures that make up the Wellness Retreat at Playa Grande. The project also includes a guest house, yoga pavilion, beach spa and glitch house, totaling approximately 30,000 square feet. In the most diagrammatic sense, the Lodge is simply a transformation of a courtyard parti. Directed by solar orientation, natural ventilation and the desire to preserve all existing trees and vegetation, the evolved form is a drifting ring that shifts in plan and section just below the jungle’s canopy. The roof is a ruled surface requiring over 200 scissor trusses; each is dimensionally unique, but simple in joinery and construction. The result is a highly complex and fluid structural condition that shifts along corridors, curves through primary double height spaces, and rotates to navigate the geometry at each corner. The design facilitates a panoramic experience of the site, from its diverse jungle landscape to its vast ocean views.
Six Square House | Bridgehampton, New York
Located on a 2 acre lot adjacent to a historic house in Bridgehampton, New York, the “Six Square House” is made up of six 24’x24’ modules each featuring a gabled geometry. The six modules are composed to create continuous momentum between exterior roof ridges, while roof eaves flow upward and downward along curves to break away from tradition. While simple exterior materials highlight the dynamic roof geometry from various viewpoints around the site, the roof composition translates to the house’s interior and naturally delineates 6 distinct programs. The 3,500 square foot house contains 2 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, kitchen, living spaces, an outdoor porch and garage. Living spaces open directly onto a landscape designed for entertaining: central court, meadow and pool house. The kitchen, located at the center of the house, is adjacent to a “left-over” triangular court and looks through the open porch that frames views of landscape beyond. Living spaces and kitchen are linked to one another to serve as a large open space emphasizing the flow of continuous ruled ceiling geometry, while bedrooms feature framed views of the site’s mature and gnarled trees for privacy. Standing in the middle of the site, one can glimpse archetypal gables silhouetted against the undulating roof geometries, emphasizing the evolution of the typology in a layering of forms.
