SO–IL

SO–IL is an architecture studio in Brooklyn founded in 2008 by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu. The practice designs residential and public projects that explore the boundary between enclosed and open space, working with materials like perforated metal and mesh.

Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu (a Dutch architect who trained under SANAA in Tokyo and a Chinese-American architect schooled at Tulane) founded SO–IL in Brooklyn in 2008 with a question embedded in the name: what are solid objectives, exactly? The studio works across perforated-metal residential facades, mesh-and-hammock public installations, affordable housing courtyards, and art campus galleries, but the through-line isn't typological. It's about the edge between exposure and enclosure: where a building stops performing as a container and starts behaving as a threshold. Their housing pushes circulation to the exterior, giving every unit a stoop; their cultural spaces decline the warehouse-chic default. The work keeps asking how much ambiguity a structure can hold before it stops welcoming people. And how little decoration a room needs before it lets the space itself speak.