I/you let matter take part
Experimental design studio i/thee treats softness as a way of engaging with the world, giving agency to mud, algaepaper, woodweather and play. In public installations, experimental shelters and landscape pavilions, the studio is built through exchange rather than command.
Materials are spilled, corroded, plasticized, piled or thrown on the ground and then left to bear traces of gravity, touch, climate and chance. The project is generous as it asks architecture to listen before it takes shape.
The group describes their practice through the idea of ”sentiment”, a term they use to connect living and non-living things. This sensitivity gives the work its unusual tenderness. A booth can behave like a puddle. A play structure can invite adults back to physical curiosity. A paper shelter can be started in a hole dug in the ground. In any case, the architecture of the studio takes its form through contact.
The studio’s work is tactile, strange and often joyful. It poses serious ecological questions through spaces that invite people to gather, climb, sit, look and move.
me/you, studio portrait. image courtesy of the architects
a puddle becomes a booth
The most direct expression of this thought appears in the Puddle Pavilion (read here), a free-form dome that hangs over Mud Creek in Bondurant, Iowa. Designed from algae-based bio-resin, the structure was cast directly into the ground without a formwork. The liquid resin is spread across the surface, gathering in uneven edges and layer thicknesses before maturing into a translucent sheet. Once raised on its supports, the pit became a public dome.
The work is fascinating because it keeps visible the memory of its creation. Its surface suggests water caught in mid-motion, with a shape guided by gravity as much as by the studio’s hand. As a public structure, it offers shade and a stopping point along the stream, yet its greatest proposition is material. Algae-based resin becomes a way to imagine construction beyond petroleum plastics, while the casting process reduces the need for wasteful molds.
Puddle Pavilion, i/thee, Iowa, USA, 2025. image courtesy of the architects
erosion as public infrastructure
At Lake Petocka in Bondurant, i/thee’s The Dining Room extends this interest in landscape and process through the embalmed earth. The installation creates a public dining and picnic area through two earthen walls that appear worn away to reveal benches, tables and usable surfaces. ArchDaily describes the project as an earth pavilion that uses natural forces to shape public infrastructure.
Here, the weather becomes part of the language of architecture. The walls feel as if they have been slowly opened by time, giving the picnic area a sense of age beyond its actual construction. The project turns public seating into a conversation with erosion, soil and shared use. It suggests that urban space can be resilient without feeling shut out from change.
The Dining Room, i/thee, Iowa, USA, 2024. image courtesy of the architects
they play as spatial ethics
The softness of i/thee also comes through in the game. Completed in Amboy, California, ReEmber Playland was designed as a recyclable adult play area for Teva’s ReEmber collection. Constructed from interchangeable set pieces with the Amboy Salt Flats, the installation encouraged users to climb, pose, rearrange themselves and move through a surreal desert playground.
The work could have been a simple named ensemble, but I/you turned it into a small choreography of bodies and objects. Its value lies in its invitation to relaxation. Adults are given permission to experiment with balance, gesture and scale, while the scenery heightens the sense of alienation. In the studio’s larger body of work, play becomes a method to make people more receptive to their environment.
ReEmber Playland, i/thee, California, USA image courtesy of the architects
paper, land and the scale of the shelter
With Agg Hab, i/thee and Roundhouse Platform tried a more speculative type of housing. The prototype, made in Texas, was formed by molding strips of papier-mâché into sculpted holes in the ground. The project used recycled paper and non-toxic glue to create shell-like structures, transforming a familiar craft material into an experimental eco-dwelling system.
Agg Hab is important because it gives low-state hardware a new architectural seriousness. Paper carries associations of fragility, use and construction in childhood, but here it becomes structure. The earth acts as mold, laboratory and partner. The project is rough in the best sense, paving a path for architecture that begins with discarded materials and hand-based processes rather than industrial polishing.
Agg Hab, i/thee and Roundhouse Platform, Texas, USA, 2020. image courtesy of architects
a flexible frame in woodstock
On the historic grounds of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Bethel, New York, I created Peak-A-Boo (read here), a wooden pavilion formed by continuous arches and decks. The structure functions as a flexible performance space, peeking through the trees with a geometry that feels both digital and handcrafted.
Unlike the fluid surface of the Puddle Pavilion or the eroded mass of The Dining Room, Peak-A-Boo works with rhythm. Repetitive arches create a porous framework for music, rest and concentration. Its openness gives the site a renewed social use while still acknowledging the cultural memory of Woodstock. The project shows how temporary architecture can contain collective energy without hardening into monumentality.
