ignacio g. galán
[ igg - office for architecture ]

New York / Madrid
igg@ignaciogalan.com
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Desk informants/Interior intruders Gallery

Photos by Begoña Zubero

Design objects for circulating interiors, commissioned by AECID. With Jose Ahedo

Rome (Italy) / 2014

"Desk Informants/Interior Intruders" are devices for the personalization of the desk and reflect on the logics of personalization in contemporary circulating regimes.

The objects that build our interiors perform as nodes in networks of information, matter and capital. They no longer constitute the spaces we inhabit as a privileged realm of privacy—as interiors were conventionally understood—, but rather socialize these spaces. The way we interact with them within our daily routines is also part of the same networks, in ways that overcome the logics of fashion and the notion of habitus understood as a series of stabilizing collective symbolic systems and practices that structure ways of doing and being. Contemporary regimes produce constant disjunctures among those systems and practices and are rather articulated around the simultaneous circulation of images and people creating contingent networks rather than stable structures.

Within these regimes, objects populating interiors link personal decisions with geographies of production, individual physiological needs and collectively built paranoia. These objects enact the logics of these different orders, mobilizing around them new postures, physiologies, economic transactions, geographies of production, opinion making and scientific knowledge. Our drinking devices and the amount of water we consume is connected as much to World Health Organization studies as it is to garbage production. Having a cactus in our work space is no longer mere aesthetic decision, since we learnt they absorb harmful radiation from our computers.

Photo by Begoña Zubero.

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Acordeón Office Sidebar

  • About Open or Close

    [igg - office for architecture] is a design and research office based in New York City and led by Ignacio G. Galán, PhD. Our work focuses on architecture's role in the articulation of society through design projects, research, and pedagogical endeavors. The designs of the office have been awarded in competitions including the First Prize for the New Velodrome in Medellín and are part of the permanent collection of the Pompidou Center. The office was a finalist to the 2014 Iakov Chernikhov Prize as a result of its contributions to design culture. 

    We operate through diverse media and platforms and are continuously informed by different kinds of conversations and collaborations. Galán's research has led to the production of several publications and exhibitions including the installation Cinecittá Occupata for the 2014 Venice Biennale by invitation of the general curator Rem Koolhaas. Together with the After Belonging Agency, Galán was the Chief Curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale (Graham Foundation Grant 2015). He is also a member of the research project Radical Pedagogies and has co-curated its exhibition at the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale and at the 2014 Venice Biennale, where it was awarded a Special Mention of the jury. He is currently one of the editors of the eponymous volume, forthcoming in 2020 by Sternberg Press (Graham Foundation Grant 2019).

    Additionally, Galán is an architecture historian working on the intersection of architecture, politics, and media, with a particular focus on nationalism, colonialism, and diverse forms of population displacement in the 20th and 21st centuries.

    Galán studied Architecture at ETSAMadrid and TUDelft, he graduated with Distinction from the MArchII program at Harvard GSD, and has a PhD in Architecture History and Theory of Architecture from Princeton. He has been a Fellow at the Spanish Academy in Rome and a Fulbright Scholar. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Barnard+Columbia Colleges and has taught studios and seminars at Columbia GSAPP and PennDesign among others.

  • Statement Open or Close

    We understand architecture as a key agent participating in the articulation of society. 

    We explore the ways in which architecture contributes to the definition of new ways of being together.

    We are concerned with architecture's relation to cultural transfers, material networks, and diverse forms of population transience in a global context. The relation of these forms of circulation challenge our understanding of architecture (conventionally associated with control, enclosure, permanence, and stability), requires new imaginations for our ways of being together and consequently remains a realm for further inquiry and intervention.

    We are additionally interested in the objects, media technologies, and institutions transforming architecture's individual occupations, its collective operations, and its diverse types of mobilization. 

    These emphases lead the work of the office and continuously challenge our methods of analysis and our design practice.