Adam Frampton & Karolina Czeczek: Only If — Far and Near

Gensler Visiting Critic Lecture

Abstract

In this lecture, Gensler Visiting Critic Adam Frampton and Karolina Czeczek will present Only If's recent work spanning a range of different types and scales, from small-scale interiors to single-family and multiple-family residential projects to public landscapes and large-scale urban planning, research, and speculation. The lecture will focus on the intersection of Only If's work between architecture and urbanism and research and practice, exploring how designers can critically address larger questions on how cities and landscapes are formed, how they will adapt and change in the future, and how we live collectively.

Biographies

Only If is a New York City-based design practice for architecture and urbanism founded in 2013 and led by Karolina Czeczek, RA, and Adam Frampton, AIA. Only If's projects have been featured in The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest, Interior Design, Frame, Domus, Wallpaper*, Azure, and The Architect's Newspaper, among other publications. In 2022, Only If's Narrow House was nominated for the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize, and Only If was also named part of Architectural Record's Design Vanguard. In 2020, Only If was named as one of the 50 best emerging architecture firms in the world by Domus. Only If has also been recognized as Architect Magazine's Next Progressives (2019), The Architect's Newspaper's AN Interior 50 (2018, 2019), a winner of the 2018 AIANY New Practices New York, PIN-UP Magazine's New Power Generation (2017), and the World Interior News's 2016 Emerging Interior Practice of the Year.

Adam Frampton, AIA, is an architect and a principal of Only If, a New York City-based design practice for architecture and urbanism, which he founded in 2013. Frampton is also currently a Design Critic at Harvard University GSD and has also taught as a Visiting Critic at Rice University, as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, and at Parsons, Syracuse University, and the University of Kentucky. He is the coauthor of Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook (2012), which maps Hong Kong's three-dimensional networks of pedestrian circulation and public space. His work and research have been exhibited in the 12th, 14th, 16th, and 17th Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, the M+ Hong Kong, the Lisbon Triennale, the Rotterdam Biennale, the Shenzhen Biennale, the Sao Paolo Biennale, the Seoul Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Center for Architecture, and the Van Alen Institute, New York. Previously, he worked as an associate at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam and Hong Kong from 2006 to 2013. He holds an M.Arch. from Princeton University and is a licensed architect in the United States and the Netherlands.

Karolina Czeczek is an architect, urban designer, and principal at Only If. She is currently a Critic at the Yale School of Architecture and has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt, a Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, a Visiting Critic at the Syracuse University School of Architecture, an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky College of Design (CoD), and an Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP). She is the author of several articles on New York City public pools that explore the history, form, social, and cultural aspects of the swimming pool as an architectural type. She is a Fulbright Scholar who holds master's degrees in architecture and urban design from Yale University and the Cracow University of Technology. At Yale, she was nominated twice for the Feldman Prize and received the Winchester Travel Fellowship. Czeczek previously worked at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam and Hong Kong from 2010 through 2013. At OMA, she was involved in the design of buildings and urban plans in the Netherlands, Australia, China, Morocco, and Egypt.