Photos courtesy of Alma Ramos.
Young Architects Program (YAP), a collaboration between Leah Wulfman and 5-year-old Jin Meisenberg, invites participants to bounce upon their understanding of space through an inflatable video game and mixed reality architecture installation.
Through a series of asynchronous discussions and collaborative drawing exercises, Jin and Leah continuously imagined and brought to life the other’s images and interpretations. Young architects and forever kids can similarly freely reinterpret, reenvision, and remap the inflatable and deflatable architectural forms within the exhibition. With crayon and marker in hand, participants of all ages have the agency to be game and space makers, bridging physical and digital play learning as their own paper crayon drawings are live projection mapped onto the inflatables and existing drawings.
The two- and three-dimensional inflated forms and drawn reinterpretations play off common architectural elements and features, toy blocks and kit-of-parts building toys, but tend instead toward queer means and ends. In concept and as full-scale inflatables, the toys flop over one another; they sag, they deflate, they inflate, they get soft, they get hard, they pile and plug into each other.
As a column becomes a chimney with balloons becomes a tower becomes a mountain, doors and windows open up new spaces and stories, promoting an iterative retelling of the architectural forms and elements.
YAP is part of our M&A Storefront co-residency program, a series of spatialized, transdisciplinary collaborations that aim to reject and confound the divisive effects of disciplinarity.
An Introduction by Jin Ketevan Georgia Meisenberg:
“This is a fairy house,
This is a funny dinosaur - a rhinoceros,
This is for me like a big funny dinosaur and it is t.rex,
This is for me a rainbow angel.
It’s super special, it can make hoops, and turns like a good good flyer.
This is a sand-clock house, it can fly it has 3 crowns on it that’s why, it can fly.
This is an eye house, it has something special, the eyes can move, close and it can fly.
This is the littlest thinnest house, it can transform into a tree or a big big eye ball
The biggest biggest biggest house from all is something even more special, it is a rainbow dot, they are super special, they can fly and jump away. But the most special is the spiral on top of the house, it has pink dots, they are super special as they can swim inside of the spiral. And because I love uzumaki! Uzumaki means spiral, and it is a story. It is a little bit scary. Because everyone loves uzumaki!
Hm I think it’s a little clock for me inside of a rainbow rainbow house—people make rainbows inside, they make them with stardust and water and rainbow colors, glitter, and of course, stars, nothing else. They can do hundred sixty forty eight rainbows in one night. These rainbows are Special as they can fly, jump, pee and make kaka.
A House inside, they just sleep for the whole day they don’t do anything they are just bored because they are sleepyheads, if someone asks them to make food they say later. They sleep for their whole lives, they don’t care at all!
Bored people! They are all sleepyheads!
They don’t want to get up later! They just lie in bed. Sleepy bored sleepy cleany.
This is a wheel home, no it’s a rocket!
It can fly to the galaxy. In the middle of the galaxy, there is the biggest wave, the biggest black hole, when you go through it you disappear, you don’t come back. It’s like death. It kills you. It’s painful, you never can go back, you are just dead. It looks like magic, but it kills you!
A flying home, a chicken home, it says bok bok bok, no it say kukeldifooooo, it walks like a chicken. And it has a chicken tail.
It’s a waterhome where water comes out—they make water just out of water! They squirt it out of the home. To make everyone wet! They just have fun.
Images
Drawings & Renderings
Leah Wulfman is a Carrier Bag architect, educator, game designer, digital puppeteer, and occasional writer. Trained as an architect, Wulfman has been assembling hybrid virtual and physical spaces to prototype new relationships to technology and nature and challenge normative ideologies so often reinforced by technology and architecture. In addition to mixed reality installations that play with and emphasize the physical, material basis of everything digital, they are presently working on a research series focusing on gamified environments, interactions, and materials. Such mixed reality ecologies and interactions find their foundations in disability, trans, and queer embodied practice and politics, and operate as lenses to reconfigure and recontextualize space and time orientations in architectural discourse beyond the normative.
Wulfman holds a Bachelors of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as a Masters of Arts in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc. They have taught at numerous institutions in the United States, including ArtCenter’s Media Design Practices Graduate Program, IDEAS Program at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, SCI-Arc, The School of Architecture at Taliesin, and most recently University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where they have developed youth programming and mixed reality coursework. Leah is now at the University of Utah’s College of Architecture and Planning, where they are currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the Division of Multi-Disciplinary Design (MDD).
Jin Ketevan Georgia Meisenberg is 5 years old. I was born in 16 November of 2024. Leah came to NY, and we have another family member that is named Lia. I was swinging on the 24th on a chair. I have a lot of fun, and I will put my legs up and I will fly like an Astronaut. I am from NY — from Queens! No Brooklyn!
Project Credits
Young Architects Program (YAP) is generously supported via material research assistance provided by Seth Richardson, Owen Vollick-Offer, Emma Caroline Davis, Enrique Mora, and Jules Gershman, game development assistance from Spencer Reay, and projection mapping assistance from Merel Noorlander.
Special thanks to: Anne K.E. and Florian Meisenberg, The Architectural League of New York & the University of Utah’s Division of Multi-Disciplinary Design (MDD).