In his more than six–decade career, architect Bruce Goff designed over 500 projects and completed about 150 buildings. His creative life and daring body of work continue to inspire contemporary architects.
Join Bruce Goff: Material Worlds co-curators Alison Fisher and Craig Lee as they talk to leading architects from the firms New Affiliates and Norman Kelley to explore how Goff’s life and work informs their practice today.
This discussion features two architects from each firm—Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb of New York-based New Affiliates, who designed the Goff exhibition, and Thomas Kelley and Carrie Norman of Norman Kelley, based in Chicago and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both firms have launched their own explorations of Bruce Goff’s work in recent years to produce new projects and pedagogical ideas.
This program is made possible by the R. Solomon Lectureship Fund.
About the Speakers
New Affiliates is an award-winning architecture studio founded by Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb. Based in New York, the studio works across a range of scales and typologies—from ground-up buildings and interiors to residential, commercial, and cultural projects. Over the last decade, they have developed an expertise in large-scale exhibition and installation design through ongoing collaborations with leading arts institutions including the Jewish Museum, the Shed, and the Park Avenue Armory. They’re drawn to organizations that see architecture as part of a broader cultural dialogue—and who value design as a tool for evolving with their communities over time.
New Affiliates’ work in the art world has directly shaped their approach to sustainability and reuse. Designing for institutions where production cycles are fast and often temporary has made them increasingly attentive to material waste—and pushed them to ask how architectural practice might adapt. In response, they have launched initiatives like Testbeds, which repurposes architectural mockups into civic infrastructure for community and cultural use. Building on collaborations with city agencies, including the Departments of Sanitation and Parks and Recreation, this research creates a feedback loop within the firm’s broader practice: what they learn through reuse becomes a generative design strategy, informing everything from early concept to construction detail.
New Affiliates have had their work exhibited and published internationally, including in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition New York, New Publics. They have been featured as “Next Progressives” in Architect Magazine and in the Architect’s Newspaper’s Interior Top 50 List. They have also been honored with the Architectural League Prize, the AIA New York New Practices Award, a Bessie Award for Outstanding Visual Design, and a Design Excellence Award from New York City’s Public Design Commission.
Norman Kelley is an architecture and design collaborative that was founded in 2012 by Thomas Kelley and Carrie Norman, AIA. Norman Kelley works in residential architecture, commercial interiors, furniture design, exhibition design, and design criticism. Their process is sensitive to place and irreverent to tradition. Their offices are located in Chicago and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Clients and collaborators include Aesop, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Noguchi Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Beacon Capital Partners, the Graham Foundation, Notre, and the artist Brendan Fernandes, among others. Their furniture has been presented by Volume Gallery and Friedman Benda.
Norman Kelley’s work has been published in the New York Times, Log, Avery Review, Architect Magazine, Architect’s Newspaper, Cultured, Domus, Dezeen, Wallpaper, and Frame. They have contributed work to the Venice Architecture Biennial (2014, 2021), the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2015, 2017), and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2019). In addition, they are the recipients of the Architectural League of New York Young Architect’s Prize (2014) and a United States Artists Fellowship in Architecture (2018).
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Closed captioning will be available for this program. For questions related to accessibility accommodations, please email [email protected].
