STUDIO ADDRESS

67 35th Street Unit B529
Brooklyn NY 11232

CONTACT

info@giawolff.com

SOCIAL

@giawolff

STUDIO

Gia Wolff is a New York-based Design Studio focusing on distinct projects, clients, and cultural propositions situated within environments, buildings and interiors, bringing together objects, performance, and experiences. 

Each project finds contextual components to drive concepts and allow unique forms to take shape. The studio seeks to embody a reciprocal relationship between the user and the built environment to foster architecture’s performative dimension. Designs are studied simultaneously from the ‘inside out’ and ‘outside in’ to identify the sui generis for each project.

BIO

GIA WOLFF is a Design Director leading projects on both coasts and internationally.  She brings together creative teams specific to each project and weaves ideas into holistic, creative compositions. 

Stemming from her time working with the renowned artist Vito Acconci (Acconci Studio), and other architecture practices of note, her studio is grounded in a collaborative and artistic approach. 

In 2013, Wolff received the inaugural Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize for her project, Floating City: The Community-Based Architecture of Parade Floats, about the traditions of parade floats—elaborate temporary and mobile constructions that are realized annually in various carnivals and festivals around the world. This subject continues to embed itself in her work as a source of inspiration from research into practice. Such opportunities are a way of examining design at the fringe of architecture, the liminal space outside of architecture, where interrogation and play provoke new ideas. 

Wolff is an ongoing collaborator with curator Claire Tancons, on projects such as Canopy, an installation featured in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall for the show: Up Hill Down Hall: An Indoor Carnival (London, England, 2014), and as the Architecture Director for Tide by Side, (alongside Claire Tancons, Artistic Director and Arto Lindsay, Music Director) for the opening processional of the OMA designed Faena Forum in Miami Beach (2016).

Architecture is structural by definition, but not all structures are necessarily permanent or visible. As such, Wolff looks to capture the drama and cinematic unfolding of space. Her interest in perception and experience is personal to each project bringing the viewer center stage as the protagonist and participant, making each space a story to be rewritten by each user.

EDUCATION

M. Arch 2008
Harvard Graduate School of Design

BFA 2001
Parsons School of Design

TEACHING

Princeton University 2016-19
ARC 350 Junior Studio Primal Retreat: A space for two polemically opposite inhabitants

Program Synopsis:
Each student will design a series of spaces for two related, but polemically opposite people. This building is a primal retreat for them to create, think, or invent. The retreat is minimal and bears only the essential needs necessary to reduce distractions and make a personal place that performs as a mirror of their personalities. Only the absolutely necessary elements will be contained in the space, and the space itself - its volumes, enclosures, openings, lighting, and circulation - must be carefully crafted to amplify the program of each user’s extreme personality.

Cooper Union 2012-16
Drawing Seminar co-taught with Michael Webb (Archigram)

Program Synopsis:
The first part of the course engaged the  students in short exercises from studio figure drawing to explorations in the city; students studied scale, perspective, and proportion, as well as different mediums and techniques. The second part applied these skills to a longer project drawing analysis of different scenes from Buster Keaton films: ‘Sherlock Jr’, ‘One Week’, and ‘The Scarecrow’. Students dissected how spaces cinematically unfold by discovering their underlying structures and rules, and then all the ways these were broken, disrupted and jostled resulting in spatial drawings that, like the films, unfolded in playful and unexpected ways.  

Pratt Institute 2008-16 
Arch 400  Body Building and Flexed Spaces

Program Synopsis:
This studio asks if a garment can be a paradigm for a building. A need will be determined in which space will be defined through the movement of the body. The interest of this course is to expose the students to alternative approaches to the making of architecture - specifically through scale, technology, and fabrication. This is a cross-disciplinary course that seeks to bring fundamental methodologies of architecture to the forefront while questioning how architecture can be more adaptive to the ever-changing nature of our profession.