PARALLELOA

parallelOA is a transdisciplinary atelier combining architecture, design, art and craftsmanship and expressing the shared aspirations of architect Vincenzo Iovino and designer Lucina Hartley-Koudelka.

Our architectural research lies upon the analysis of places, the understanding of territories and the willingness to respect their aesthetic and cultural background. We base our work upon the concepts of self-sufficiency, environmental impact reduction and social endurance.

Drawing, building models, and experimenting with colors, materials and mechanisms are central to our design process. This empirical, tactile approach gives us a sense of being more connected to what we create and the world we live in. Our interior design projects are enriched by the making of site specific furniture in collaboration with craftsmen.

The way the tangible world influences peoples' feelings, movements, actions, and interactions, intrigues us. We are interested in the conversations between spirit/matter, mind/body, reason/emotion, objective/subjective, aesthetic/functional, useful/useless, serious/playful. Our projects enable us to explore and express these relationships.

//OA is currently working on various public and private projects. A photography gallery in Paris, a motors study laboratory and a co-working space, both in the engineering school l'École des Mines ParisTech are among the projects we have recently completed.

Vincenzo Iovino was born in Italy in 1981. He grew up in the bustling outskirts of Naples. There he came to know the important cultural tradition of the city, as well as the puzzling development issues of a dense urban milieu. In 2006 he graduated in architecture at the Federico II University of Naples. During his studies he focused on self-sustaining building and new construction techniques aimed at enhancing worker safety and reducing environmental impact.

Soon after graduating, he moved to Paris, where he had the opportunity to work with some of the most influential leaders in contemporary architecture, namely Massimiliano Fuksas (in 2007), Frank O. Gehry (from 2008 to 2010), and Renzo Piano (from 2011 to 2014). His experience with Gehry led him to be noted for his skills in conceiving technical details. This attitude proved afterwards to be crucial in his participation in some of Piano's projects in different countries.

Since the very early stages of his career, he has been willing to explore the complex interactions between buildings and the natural and social context, committing himself to environmental sustainability and social endurance as primary values for his work. In order to fully implement his lines of research, in 2015 he began to work as a free-lance professional, both in the private and in the public sectors, winning contests for the development of new civil spaces.

He lives in Paris and he is enthusiast about design, photography and sustainable agriculture. In his spare time, he likes cooking, usually paying tribute to his native Italian cuisine.

Lucina was born in France in 1986 to a Californian mother and a Moravian father, both photographers. She spent her childhood in the outskirts of Paris and her adolescence in the heart of Mexico city. A fascination for color took possession of her in Mexico that has stayed with her ever since.

She returned to Paris in 2005 where she studied object design at the school of Decorative Arts. Though she was interested in most fields of art and design, object design seemed to her the most central, better enabling her to navigate in an ocean of possibilities. For her graduation, she invented an object which explores the fact that we cross paths with so many people we don’t know in the course of our daily life.

An internship at la Cinémathèque de la danse filled her eyes with images in movement of dance throughout the world and time. In Los Angeles, she interned at Commune design, where she had the chance to spend time in a studio where space, object and graphic design are combined.

She has worked as an assistant to three painters, Pedro Diego Alvarado in Mexico city, Antonio Seguí in Paris and Catalina Van Cawelaert in Brussels. For a year, she worked in the immensely inspiring atelier of Sheila Hicks, an artist who’s primary material is string.

Since 2012 she works as an independent designer. She is drawn to shapes, composition, shadows, the way people express themselves, Japan, ceramics, glass, ambiguity, contradictions, nuance. Doubt and certainty fuel her curiosity.

//OA has been a chance for her to put into practice her aspiration to creating spaces one can engage in a relationship with, spaces that are expressive, and not distant because of the need to please the greater number and drastically reduce time and cost. She has enjoyed seeing their maquettes turn into reality only 100 times larger, and seeing how color affects space and the feeling of a space.