Ole Sondresen - The Architect's Ingredients from The Avant/Garde Diaries on Vimeo.
A factory along the Greenpoint waterfront is set to be Kickstarter's headquarters, and the mastermind behind the conversion is Norwegian architect Ole Sondresen. He has grand-yet-sort-of-hazy plans for 58 Kent Street?a red-brick industrial building formerly occupied by the Eberhard Faber Pencil Co. and the soon-to-be-home for those do-gooder crowdsourcing fundraisers?and Brownstoner pointed out that some of them are captured in this short documentary by filmmaker Margarita Jimeno, which is an installment in a larger video interview series called The Avant/Garde Diaries.
Get past the whole of-course-the-architect-rides-a-bike-to-work intro, and the video offers some cool insights into a building whose renovation, up until now, has been somewhat of a mystery despite some speedy initial construction work. Sondresen, who would rather use old or reclaimed materials than new ones, is applying this philosophy to the Kickstarter building, which is the first entirely new one he and his team have designed in New York. He explains:
"We're reusing and recycling the whole building, and we're actually putting an inverted glass box on the inside?very Renaissance. It's fitting to New York, because New York is so dirty, you know, but you want daylight, you want nature, you want all that. So you expand your house to make it inside... This is post-recycled jeans, used for insulation. You can actually eat these, this is how healthy this material is."
Sondresen, in fact, practices what he preaches?his Soho office at 80 Wooster Street was formerly the studio of Lithuanian-American artist George Maciunas, and contains a carefully preserved courtyard in which folks like Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono regularly chilled.
· Video: The Architect's Ingredients [Guespa Films by Margarita Jimena]
· The Avant/Garde Diaries: Weekly Interviews with the Extraordinary [www.theavantgardediaries.com]
· Leaving the Ruin at Kickstarter HQ [Brownstoner]
· Kickstarter HQ Construction Picks Right Up in Greenpoint [Curbed]
· Ole Sondresen/58 Kent Street coverage [Curbed]
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