--from AD 2011/July & August

George L Legendre’s fusion of design, mathematics and computation took off

in print starting with IJP: The Book of Surfaces (AA Publications, 2003). Part

publisher’s spread and part mathematical surface, this playful manifesto was closely

followed by the Henderson Waves project (2004–8), in which his newly minted,

eponymous office IJP deployed similar principles to design and tender the tallest

pedestrian bridge in Southeast Asia. The contractor borrowed the book’s original

notation to identify the project’s parts – bridging the gap between theory and

practice. Since graduating from Harvard, Legendre’s work has been defined by the

full-time decade he spent in academia. An Assistant Professor of Architecture at

the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) from his mid-20s, he has been a

visiting professor at ETH Zurich and Princeton University, and master of Diploma

Unit 5 at the London-based Architectural Association School of Architecture,

where he undertook for eight years (alongside Lluís Viu Rebès) the intense

educational experiments for which the place was famed. He returned to Harvard in

2008 as a visiting design critic before being appointed Adjunct Associate Professor.

Freely inspired by analytic mathematics, computer programming, the literary

pranks of Oulipo and other less highbrow forms of automatic writing, the work

of IJP is closely identified with the emergent computational avant-garde. While

cherishing this brotherly affiliation, IJP’s attachment to traditional values of

instrumentation and artistic probity has been equally important. To date the

office has won a competition to cover a central London street with glass (with

Adams Kara Taylor), and completed Henderson Waves (with RSP) in Singapore.

In 2011, the practice was a finalist of the MoMA-PS1 design competition. The

influential weekly Building Design recently elected the firm as one of the top five

practices in the UK led by principals under the age of 40. The work of the firm has

been featured on the cover of AA Files, the RIBA Journal, Mondo Arc Perspective +

and Icon Magazine among others. A regularly published lecturer and essayist, in

addition to IJP: The Book of Surfaces, Legendre is also the author of Bodyline: the

End of our Meta-Mechanical Body (AA Publications, 2006) and a critical essay, ‘JP’s

Way’, in Mohsen Mostafavi’s Mathematical Form: John Pickering and the Architecture

of the Inversion Principle (AA Publications, 2006). His next research piece, Pasta

by Design (see pp 100–1 of this issue) will be published by Thames & Hudson in

September 2011.