MILLIØNS
‘We find it impossible to imagine architecture apart from a kind of expansive, ongoing project of observation and investigation, as a way of continually understanding the world around us,’ say Zeina Koreitem and John May, founders of Milliøns, a small LA studio with an outsized vision for architecture. For them, architecture has the potential to have ‘stimulating effects on people and publics to be better versions of themselves, and to live differently.’ In short, design is a kind of impetus to live up to something bigger. What that is, exactly, keeps evolving.
Koreitem and May first started working together in 2012 and formalised their collaboration into a business a few years later. For them, design stretches across a wide range of activities: they write, create furniture, curate exhibitions, practise architecture and teach. Koreitem is design faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and May is an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Like many architectsof their generation, juggling each of these projects is an all-consuming enterprise where the borders between different disciplines, design and research, work and life are purposefully blurry.
‘Our practice is completely multi-hyphenated,’ they explain. The term is the theme of a recent issue of Harvard Design Magazine that the duo guest-edited with fellow architect/educator Sean Canty. The publication theorises all the curious ways that a transdisciplinary approach reflects a zeitgeist brimming with creative possibilities.
Some of those possibilities come together in Milliøns’ design for a new café at the IM Pei-designed Everson Museum of Artin Syracuse, New York. Their chromatic design, currently in development, features ceramics donated by Texas-based collector Louise Rosenfield, who stipulated that her pieces remain in use – an unusually risky requirement. ‘She believes that ceramics can only be understood through their use in everyday life,’ note Koreitem and May approvingly. Architecture and design, so lofty in ambition, are ultimately part of a fragile cycle of obsolescence. millionsarchitecture.com
SHIN SHIN ARCHITECTURE
A female- and minority-owned architecture studio founded in Santa Monica by principal Melissa Shin in 2019, Shin Shin comprises a small team of just three. The LA- and Detroit-based practice’s work ranges from ADUs (Accessory Dwelling Units) and single-family homes to multi-family residences and
