Founded in 2017. Based in New York.
Human Being Design is a full-service design practice at the intersection of individuality and community. We offer services on projects including: residences, installations, everyday items, and memorial artifacts.
We design for all phases of life, and after.
Human Being Design offers end-of-life planning and design services including: funerary rites, burial constructs, and monuments, memorials, and artifacts of human being.
We engage in both commissioned and self-initiated projects.
Human Being Design is currently working on:
SEMI-SUB-URBAN (with RNAW Architects) a private client’s mixed-use residential development in suburban Hopewell, New Jersey
ABODE a private residence on the peak of a six-acre site in north Santa Fe, New Mexico
CABIN a private client’s semi-rural residence in the northeast US
LIGHTS a series of handmade paper lightshades
NEO-CAIRNS a parametric crypto-architectonic memorial typology
VESSELS a series of multi-human urns for private clients
Our previous projects include:
STATION (with Woolley Morris Architects) a private client’s mixed-use commercial-residential complex near the Princeton Junction Train Station in New Jersey
GROW (with Trenton Grows Inc.) a nonprofit, youth-oriented, temporary educational garden
DOMICILE a design for a private client’s suburban residence in Princeton, New Jersey
Human Being Design is built upon our past projects:
POST-MORDIAL a graduate thesis
ISOTOPIA an undergraduate thesis
Our architectural practice (A) centers on affordable housing and equitable communal spaces for a working class populace, with an emphasis on ease of construction, efficient and sustainable material economy, and above all, long term habitability for the occupant — our foremost constituent. Our design research (B) is focused on novel means of anthropomorphic form-making, fabrication, and materiality, using fundamentally human tools, methods, and sources to explore the Enlightenment-era dyad between human and environment. Both avenues of inquiry (A+B) share in common the notion that every human is deserving of both a private space and a public expression.
Our design ethos follows a metamaterialist framework, in which material conditions are inextricable from their underlying structures, systems, and forces, and in a state of continuous reciprocal dialogue. A metamaterialist model collapses binary oppositions into interdependent, inseparable, and unified vectors: subject and object, human and environment, mind and body, bit and atom, information and medium, meaning and form: each can only be discerned in relation to the other.
Both our practice and our research use the disciplines of design and architecture as vehicles for exploring the human condition. We define design as the conscious — oftentimes planned — intervention between organisms — oftentimes human — and their environment. We define architecture as a product of mediation between an organism’s membranous body and their environment. Under a metamaterialist framework, the line between organism and environment blurs. We are thus fascinated by dualities of face versus mask, body versus suit, person versus character. For Human Being Design, both being and design — existence and agency — are inexorably intertwined. The human being — the traditional subject — and human design — the external processes and resultant object(s) — are inseparable.
Please feel free to reach out and contact us concerning anything and everything!
For more on metamaterialism, see: Timur Si-Qin, “Aesthetics of Contingency: Materialism, Evolution, Art” in Stream 04 The Paradoxes of the Living (November 2017). https://www.pca-stream.com/en/articles/timur-si-qin-aesthetics-of-contingency-materialism-evolution-art-108.
