fiveighten: 5810
Fiveighten is a collective of designers based in New York and Tokyo, exploring architecture through unconventional mediums. Moving beyond the built world, we engage with film, virtual reality, objects, and print to expand how architecture is experienced and understood. We aim to make architectural ideas more accessible while questioning their place in an era of mass commodification.
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Co-founder
Geri Roa Kim is currently an M.Arch II candidate at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where she is also a member of the Harvard Innovation Lab. She co-founded Atelier 58l0 and serves as its Director while also partnering at SaulKim Studio.
Roa's architectural work explores the intersection of technology and spatial design, with a particular focus on virtual reality as a medium for architectural innovation and education.
A graduate of Pratt Institute with highest honors, Roa received the Arthur Edwards Award for Outstanding Scholarship and won the Best Thesis Prize for her work titled Life, Death, and the Eternal Recurrence of Architecture. She also minored in Museum and Gallery Practice, studied Art as Global Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and was the recipient of the Eleanor Allwork Scholarship from AIA New York. Her past professional experience includes serving as an educator at the AIA New York | Center for Architecture.
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Co-founder
Kevlin believes architecture as the experience of space in time. His design interests are rooted in exploring the dynamic and sentient qualities of architecture, concerning elements of duration and sequence. He is captivated by the mobile components of architecture, which come in the form of elevators, escalators, vehicles and modular parts. His Thesis Prize project, Life, Death, and the Eternal Recurrence of Architecture challenges the static nature of existing preservation strategies and proposes the strategy of replication to create ‘save as’ versions of the original. Thus architecture becomes a physical timeline.
Kelvin is currently a Master of Architecture II candidate at Harvard GSD, having completed his Bachelor of Architecture at Pratt Institute. Previously, he has worked at the Store Development department at Giorgio Armani, and at Risland US - the developer for Skyline Tower in Long Island City. He also teaches at the Center for Architecture in New York during the summers.
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Lead Designer
Youngdae Song is currently a Senior Designer at Sou Fujimoto Architects. His architectural backgrounds lie in various international environments such as Seoul, New York, Mexico City, and Tokyo. Youngdae has been participating in diverse key projects from pavilion to masterplan scale with a notable contribution to the Winning International Competition “Shenzhen Reform and Opening-up Exhibition Hall” as a Core Designer.
Youngdae’s thesis project titled “Liquid Playground: Experiential Transparency” was published in The Korean Institute of Culture Architecture with an award. The project investigated a new type of spatial relativity to re-define and transform Korean architecture’s historical elements eave and landscape into fluid shading spaces and experiential fields. His project “Non-objects: Hidden Closet” was exhibited in Luis Barragán’s Casa Gilardi and Liga DF in Mexico City. His group work “Adaptable Terrain” was also installed in Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul. Youngdae gave a lecture titled “Beyond Sceneries” for the AIAS Pratt Lecture Series with his own analysis and deep understanding of Japanese architecture.
Youngdae holds a Master's degree in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University and Bachelor of Architecture from Seoul National University of Science and Technology.
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Lead Designer
Emmet Sutton is an alumni and undergraduate professor at Pratt Institute. At Pratt he received the AIA New York Center for Architecture Design Scholarship. His Honors degree project, Bypassage, contemplates the corridor, its history, and potential future. The project comprises a variety of new types of corridors interlinked to create a peripatetic medical school appended to the existing Woodhull Medical Center. In concert with his thesis, this line of corridor exploration was also exhibited at the Center for Architecture as part of an event organized and curated by Atelier 58l0.
Emmet recently completed a residency on governor’s island with the Institute of Public Architecture. His work with the IPA builds on Bypassage, revolving around the political and economic implications of the corridor, namely lobbying and labor.
Previously he has worked with Shohei Shigematsu at OMA NY, Rem Koolhaas at OMA EU, and Steven Holl at SHA. Currently, Emmet operates TUSK, an architecture office, with his two partners Safa Mehrjui and Tyler Javitz.
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Lead Designer
Jack Young, originally Atelier 58l0’s technical designer and now lead designer, is a multidisciplinary designer and researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. He is a multidisciplinary designer and researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. He is currently in the final semester of the Bachelor of Architecture program at Pratt Institute, where he is conducting thesis research on the civic revitalization of the United States Postal Service and its associated mailing logistics system, examined through a chroma-regional lens.
In addition to his thesis work, Jack is actively involved in advanced research projects with academic collaborators. He works alongside Professor Jason Vigneri Beane on various AI and fabrication projects, a leading digital analyst on the Laboratory of Integrated Archaeological Visualization and Heritage’s (LIAVH) M-LAB project at Mohenjo-Daro, contributes as an undergraduate GIS researcher for Pratt’s graduate-level Spatial Analysis & Visualization Initiative, and is part of a design team developing a prototype housing solution for the indigenous Alaskan community of Quinhagak.
Beyond his academic pursuits, Jack holds various roles within the architectural and design literary communities; serving as an editor for the 25’ Off Zine and supporting several Axiomatic Editions book publications. Professionally, Jack is a Junior Designer at Billings Jackson Studio, where he specializes in the architectural and industrial design of public and private transportation infrastructure projects.
With a focus on combining architectural design, technological innovation, and social impact, Jack continues to pursue projects that bridge the gap between traditional practice and emerging research fields.
The Many Shapes of Fiveighten
When a collective emerges from its cocoon, the bystanders pick up the vulnerable creature and inspect under its bellies for two things - the medium in which they will be operating, and the values they are looking to impose. If we are to evaluate some of our most well known predecessors, we can surmise that the intrinsic relation between their ideas and the forms in which they took place. Take Archigram, whose name was derived from the combination of the words “architecture” and “telegram". Under the golden age of magazines between the 1960-90, members of the group engaged with the premier form of lionization at the time and emerged as a major architectural aesthetic for the era. Their critiques take the forms of satirical depictions of urbanism - oft taking the conclusion drawn by various architectural ideals and pushing them towards the extreme. The projects from these efforts sewn seamlessly into the medium of magazines.
Gilles Deleuze wrote in his Dialogues: “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” Post Dadaism, we now view both brick-slinging and bricklaying as creative acts. It is imperative then, that we identify the shapes of our bricks and the medium of our era.
Architecture is no longer a monolith of discipline - during our age of information, the Bauhaus of today takes the form of the internet - architects of today can no longer be content with merely sharing a hallway with its neighboring creative disciplines. Architects are therefore compelled to engage in these practices in order to understand their framework. To be in bed with the audience of today - whose phones are now as paramount to their perception as another form of senses. Contemporary architects have to utilize the frameworks they have acquired and create contents from the mediums of the informational era.
As commodified architecture became the mundanity, contemporary architects may better understand their own position from precedence of its cousins. The dadaist and pop artists have created their own responses in regards to the commodification of their mediums, contemporary pop art have leveraged the market towards their own benefit. Architects should learn from their success and elevate our mundane commodified spaces into realms of curiosity and even reverence.