SUMO    [ USA ]

Yolande Daniels

Lobby at the Musesum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, New York.

Architecture is always two-faced. Each construction is an erasure. Every object has a back-story and an unforeseeable future. SUMO engages is a spectrum of architectural production: buildings, interiors, exhibits, installations, graphics, as well as theoretical and applied research. Through this spectrum of production the emphasis of the studio is on interactive architecture where architectural production acts as a mediator between situations and desires in a world that is global and local—simultaneously divided and interconnected.

Yolande Daniels and Sunil Bald founded SUMO in 1995. The studio is located in Long Island City, New York and is engaged in diverse contexts from New York to Miami, and Japan. In 2006, the studio won a competition for affordable housing in the Little Haiti Neighborhood of Miami, Florida, and completed two built projects: the School of Management at Josai University in Sakado, Japan, and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art in Brooklyn, New York. Current projects include: the Mizuta Museum of Art at Josai University, the installation de facto de jure, the exhibition Grass Roots for the Museum for African Art, and a residential commission in Harlem, NY.

SUMO has received the Architectural Record Design Vanguard Award (2006), a New York Foundation for the Arts grant in Architecture + Environments (2002/3), the MOMA/PS1 Young Architect's Award (2002). SUMO was a finalist for the Young Architects Program of the Museum of Modern Art/PS1 (2001), and a winner of the Young Architects Award from the Architectural League of New York (1999). The work of SUMO has been published in the Journal of Architecture, SPA-De/Space Design, Architectural Record, Frame, Azure, Architecture, and GA/Global Architecture Houses. Daniels and Bald hold teaching posts at Columbia University and Yale University respectively and have also separately published essays on architecture, gender, race and national identity.

Links:
http://studiosumo.com
http://www.arch.columbia.edu
http://www.activatorarchitecture.org

Josai University, Japan.

Yolande Daniels

Yolande Daniels is a fellow of the Mac Dowell Colony (2006), the American Academy in Rome (2004), and the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of Art (1996-98). She is the founder of Activator: Architecture Agency, an organizational interface for expanding multidisciplinary architectural practices and applied research as forms of activism. She is currently working on the publication for the project black city2 that was installed in the show Harlem world at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2004). This project has been the basis of a body of research exploring race based spatial semantics through data and digital media. The project was initiated in the essay “black bodies, black space: a-waiting spectacle” (White Papers, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture, 2000).

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