Publication

  • Project Gut
    Florian Idenburg and David van der Leer
    Authors
  • GRANTEE
    Florian Idenburg & David van der Leer
    GRANT YEAR
    2013

Florian Idenburg and David van der Leer, GUT, 2013, New York. Courtesy of the artists.

What is intuition? How can architects, artists, and urban designers better understand how it works? Can intuition be positioned within the arsenal of tools available in the design process? Rarely discussed as a source for innovation, intuition might invigorate the field and open new avenues of discussion in design. Project Gut—a web publication platform conceived by Florian Idenburg and David van der Leer—investigates the possibilities and limitations of intuition. The core of the project consists of newly commissioned reflections by experts from the fields of architectural theory, didactic theory, cognitive science, and organization theory. Framed by an anthology of historic texts brought together for the first time, as well as newly commissioned visual explorations by artists and photographers, the editors complete the project through a number of interviews with people from various fields, who—wittingly or not—employ intuition in their daily life and work.

Florian Idenburg is an architect and educator. He is partner of Solid Objectives—Idenburg Liu (SO—IL). With a global reach, SO—IL brings together experience from the fields of architecture, academia, and the arts. The office works on projects ranging in scale from the world's largest tent for Frieze Art Fair in New York City, to a new art museum for the University of California at Davis, to a series of prints for the Guggenheim Museum. The work has received numerous awards, including one from the MoMAPS1 Young Architects Program, as well as the AIA Young Practices Award. Idenburg has held teaching positions at Columbia University, Princeton University, and the University of Kentucky. Currently he is an adjunct associate professor at Harvard University. He has edited two books and contributed numerous essays to an array of publications. In 2010, Idenburg received the Charlotte Kohler Prize, awarded by the Prince Bernhard Fund in the Netherlands to an exceptional talent.

David van der Leer is an urban thinker and activator, and the executive director of the Van Alen Institute in New York. Van der Leer was previously associate curator, Architecture and Urban Studies, and curator, for the BMW Guggenheim Lab at the Guggenheim Museum. BMW Guggenheim Lab was a mobile urban laboratory traveling to major cities worldwide: New York, Berlin, and Mumbai. In addition, Van der Leer curated stillspotting nyc, a two-year, multidisciplinary project that took the museum programming out into the streets of the five boroughs to find special moments of stillness. Van der Leer first worked on the exhibitions Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward and Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum. In 2012, he was cocurator for the American Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale; in 2011, at the Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, he curated an exhibition on new towns.