Kim Coleman  and   Mark Cigolle

The work of Mark Cigolle and Kim Coleman of Santa Monica, California investigates the nature of architectural collaboration. In a true design collaboration, a joint intellectual effort, the outcome of project is not predetermined, because invention and intervention from one collaborator actively alters the other's preconceived notions of where a project is going. The husband and wife team engages a wide-ranging set of architectural priorities: maintaining an architectural practice, acting as general contractor in building their design work, researching theoretical issues in an academic setting and teaching architectural design and theory. Each activity informs and reforms the ongoing collaborative process.

After receiving bachelors and masters degrees from Princeton University, Mark Cigolle (A.B. Princeton. Graduate studies at Harvard. M.Arch. Princeton) worked in the offices of Michael Graves, I.M. Pei, Richard Meier, and Peter Eisenman before starting his own firm in New York. Cigolle has taught architecture at the University of Kentucky, Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Virginia, and the University of Southern California, where he taught full time for ten years.

Kim Coleman (A.B. Smith College. M.Arch. University of Virginia.) studied fine arts at Smith College and worked as a general contractor in Washington D.C. before returning to school to pursue a graduate degree in architecture from the University of Virginia. She began working with Cigolle in New York; the two formed a partnership and moved to Los Angeles in 1982. Coleman has been a professor at the School of Architecture, University of Southern California for the past fourteen years. She teaches design studios, computer-integrated design studios, history & theory courses, and courses in design teaching.

The current and ongoing work of the team can be characterized in four broad categories:

Live-work Houses: As evolving technology has reduced the necessity to travel to a centralized work place while, at the same time, as traffic and smog increase, working and living in the same place has generated a new programmatic typology which is likely to become a prevalent option, particularly in urban areas like Los Angeles. The framework of relationships between the activities of living and working has been explored in a series of houses such as Canyon House and Sky Ranch House.

Computer Integration: The potential of the computer as it impacts on design process is an ongoing research interest of the partnership. The development of strategies to integrate the computer as an integral part of the design process has been a subject of the team's research over the past nine years. The computer may act as a catalyst that forces abstraction and provides a point of departure for a form generating process.

School and University Work: Place-making in the public realm and relationships between the external forces of context and internal forces of program are explored through educational work, including an addition to the Faculty Center at the University of Southern California, the programming, design, and construction supervision of the Wildwood School renovation in Culver City which was completed in the fall of 1993, and the design of a Head Start Facility (a competition project) for East Windsor, New Jersey.

Urban Scale Projects: The notion of a living environment where many activities occur, which is integral to the land it inhabits, is one which the team has explored explicitly in the Olympic West project, This notion also applies to Cigolle & Coleman's individual buildings, which may be viewed as collections of elements, with each element addressing critical aspects of program and site and each another.

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