Bell Seong was founded in 2010 in New York City. Eunjeong Seong joined Michael Bell to re-launch and expand the practice Bell founded in Berkeley, California and led in Houston and New York City since 1989.
Visible Weather - Research + Design. Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong founded Visible Weather as a research + design firm focused on energy, engineering, materials science, advanced manufacturing and urban economics. Visible Weather as founded in 2011 in New York. Our partners have included Transsolar, Arup, Buro Happold, Lafarge, Oldcastle Glass and advanced manufacturing companies in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. We have also collaborted with Jesse Keenan/Keenan Climate and Community Solutions.
8 Minutes, 20 Seconds Part One, Housing After Banking, outlines a history of housing focused on major, but also less studied events in the last 100 years of its policies and economics. We work through foundational premises in housing asking if the future of each might be more fragile than they appear. It leads to the early days of federal research on renewable energy; before the formation of NREL or the DOE but as globalization and the financialization of housing began a dramatic expansion. Instead of imagining renewable energy as an adjunct to the forms of scarcity that often define today’s housing markets, what if it displaced the nexus of development we know? Eclipsing the economies that normally define housing markets in the United States and around the world. A movement towards abundance.
Part Two, Encrypting the Sun, presents proposals for both a new type of housing—as renewable energy asset—and a new type of design team that could expand access to shelter by fusing the potential of advanced materials, manufacturing and energy harvest. Our collaborators Michael Pilliod, Wills Sweney and Thomas Powers were critical in shaping this work. We hoped to structure the book as a way to join a discussion with colleagues and students who have been a source of incredible energy for all our work.
Housing and Urbanism
Michael Bell has focused on housing and urbanization over a period of more than 25 years. Bell has sought to bring innovation to housing and to open new paths for affordability and design in projects for Houston, Texas and New York City; and with Seong for sites in Tampa, Florida and in new prototypes developed with industry partners in Silicon Valley. Bell and Seong have been commissioned for housing design and research by the Museum of Modern Art and Bell's earlier Fifth Ward - Houston-based work was included in MoMA's "Un-Private House" exhibition.
Simultaneous City, Temple Terrace, Florida
Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream
Commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art
Michael Bell, Eunjeong Seong, Bell-Seong Architecture / Visible Weather
"12 hours in 7 minutes 7 seconds" Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong
Foreclosed : Rehousing the American Dream
The Museum of Modern Art
Simultaneous City, Temple Terrace, Florida "Four months in 13 minutes 3 seconds" Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong
Foreclosed : Rehousing the American Dream
The Museum of Modern Art
Selected, Exhibitions, Publications
2025 — Is Housing Still Housing
Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design. March 3 – April 11, 2025. Curated by Michael Bell, Eunjeong Seong, Gail Borden. Funded by the University of Houston. Is Housing Still Housing revisits 16 Houses, an exhibition, book and building project founded by Michael Bell in Houston in 1998.
Participants include Yung Ho Chang, Neil Denari, Rene Peralta, Carlos Jimenez, Lindy Roy and Sanford Kwinter. As well as Christina Sanders, Columbia Climate School; Jesse Keenan, Tulane University and Stephen Fox, Rice University, historian.
2019 — Jenna McKinight documents the newly updated Binocular Housefor Dezeen. May 7, 2019. . LINK
Originally completed in 2007 the Binocular House is being updated and its grounds newly designed by Field Operations.
Selected Projects
Shanghai, China
Westbund Galleries, Shanghia, China. One of twelve new galleries that comprise an extended museum and the first West Bund Biennale. The twelve new buildings are sited along the Huangpu River adjacent to the new DreamWorks animation campus. Bell and Seong were commissioned along with Wang Shu, Anton Abril, Yung Ho Chang, Atelier Bow Wow, Li Hu, and Mark Lee/JohnstonMarkLee.
the Light School
Model 101 - Encrypting the Sun / Actar 2025
Model 102 - Encrypting the Sun / Actar 2025
Westbund Gallery, Shanghai, China
Simultaneous City, Museum of Modern Art
Glass House @ 2 Degrees: Fifth Ward CRC, Houston, Texas
Binocular House
Double Dihedral House: La Cienega, New Mexico
Arverne by the Sea: New York Department of Housing, Preservation and Development, New York City
California / Texas / New York
Michael Bell - 1990 - 2003
Visible Weather - Research, Materials and Structure
Lectures by Michael Bell on Henri Labrouste and Giuseppe Terragni:
At the Cooper Union Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture (October 8 and 15, 2013).
Lectures by Michael Bell on Henri Labrouste.
Revising Labrouste in the Digital Age, symposium, the Museum of Modern Art (March 28, 2013).
"Held in conjunction with the exhibition Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light, this symposium acts, in part, as the fourth section of the three-part exhibition. It explores how a 19th-century architect and his work, and particularly his innovative use of materials and light in spaces of contemplation and public assembly, are relevant in contemporary culture and architecture. Young and mid-career architects and scholars examine Labrouste’s inclusion in a 1975 exhibition at MoMA and how today’s context is different; and how issues such as the libraray in the information age and the collective expression of individual experience, and the rational ornament apply to contemporary practice."
Binocular House: Post Construction Modeling, 2018
Binocular House: Post Construction REVIT Analysis: 2018
Permanent Change: Plastics in Architecture and Engineering
Michael Bell and Craig Buckley.
Columbia Books on Architecture and the City and Princeton Architectural Press, 2014.
Post Ductility: Metals in Architecture and Engineering
Michael Bell and Craig Buckley.
Columbia Books on Architecture and the City and Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.
Solid States: Concrete in Transition
Michael Bell and Craig Buckley.
Columbia Books on Architecture and the City and Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.
Engineered Transparency: The Technical, Visual, and Spatial Effects of Glass
Michael Bell and Jeannie Kim
Columbia Books on Architecture and the City and Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
Michael Bell: Space Replaces Us: Essays and Projects on the City
The Monacelli Press, 2004.
16 Houses: Designing the Public's Private House
Michael Bell. The Monacelli Press, 2004
Slow Space
Edited by Michael Bell and Sze Tsung Leong. Monacelli Press 1998.
Introduction and two essays by Michael Bell
Stanley Saitowitz: Architecture at Rice, 33
Edited and with an introduction by Michael Bell and essay by Lars Lerup
Rice University, School of Architecture (Lars Lerup, Dean) and Princeton Architectural Press
Design by Sze Tsung Leong and Michael Bell
Slow Space, edited by Michael Bell and Sze Tsung Leong. The book cover designed by Rebeca Méndez was prototyped as a thermally sensitive surface inspired by the book's editorial structure. See Rebeca Méndez work here.
Released in the fall of 1998 Slow Space featured writing and projects by:
Lars Lerup, Álvaro Siza, Peter Testa, Robert Smithson, Michael Bell, Dana Cuff, Durham Crout, Sze Tsung Leong, Mark Wamble, RAAUm (Jesse Reiser, Polly Apfelbaum, Stan Allen, Nanako Umemoto), Greg Lynn, Hubert L. Dreyfus, Elizabeth Burns Gamard, Adi Shamir Zion, Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray, Yung-Ho Chang, Stanley Saitowitz, Steven Holl, Farès el-Dahdah, Karen Bermann, Jeanine Centuori, and Julieanna Preston, Rebeca Méndez and Aaron Betsky.
Published by Monacelli Press with critical editorial support by Gianfranco Monacelli and Andrea Monfried.
Selected Design and Research Publications
Domus 1079, Haptic Space
Guest edited by Steven Holl. Essay and Research by Michael Bell: "Catastrophe, Discrete and Haptic". May 2023
See Research
“Ten Points on a Projective Economy and Architecture” by Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong. Under Pressure, Essays on Urban Housing
Edited By Hina Jamelle, University of Pennsylvania and Routledge, 2021
Michael Bell reviews Lateness, by Peter Eisenman with Elisa Iturbe for CAA and Taylor and Francisc. 2021. LINK
"Encrypting the Sun: Housing after Banking" by Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong is published in Log: 47: Overcoming Carbon Form.
Edited by Cynthia Davidson and Guest Editor Elisa Iturbe. Available November 2019. LINK
“Encrypting the Sun; Housing after Banking” completes a trilogy of essays that preview a book of the same name -- Housing after Banking. The essays include:
TAD: The Journal of Technology | Architecture & Design, Issue 1 | VIRAL: Information Technology as Prophet, Panacea, or Pariah? “Powerwall” | By Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong
Architectural Design: AD: Mass Customized Cities, Fall 2015, edited by Tom Verebes. Includes essay by Michael Bell and architectural and urban design by Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong.
Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream is an exploration of new architectural possibilities for American cities and suburbs in the aftermath of the recent foreclosure crisis in the United States. During the summer of 2011, five interdisciplinary teams of architects, urban planners, ecologists, engineers and landscape designers were enlisted by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and MoMA PS1 to envision new housing infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation, particularly in the country's suburbs. Drawing on ideas proposed in The Buell Hypothesis, a research publication prepared by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, each team focused on a specific location within a "megaregion" to come up with inventive solutions for the future of housing and cities. This publication presents each of these proposals (exhibited at MoMA in Spring 2012) in detail, through photographs, drawings and renderings as well as interviews with the team leaders. With texts by Barry Bergdoll, MoMA's Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Henry N. Cobb, a founding partner of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and Reinhold Martin, Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center, Foreclosed examines the relationship between land, infrastructure and urban form, exploring potential futures for America's extended metropolises.
Casabella, Volume 777. "Una casa sull' Hudson," By Joan Ockman. Gefter-Press House
included with Double Dihedral House and Glass House at 2 Degrees. Milan, Italy.
Photography by
Richard Barnes and Bilyana Dimitrova.
American Masterworks: Houses of the Twentieth & Twenty-first
Centuries by Kenneth Frampton and David Larkin. Gefter-Press House
included in collection. Rizzoli, New York
Photography by
Richard Barnes.
Currents | Books: 11 More Great Homes by Elaine Louie, The New York Times, January 7, 2009
New York: 2000, Architecture and Urbanism from the Bicentennial to the Millennium by Robert A.M. Stern, David Fishman, and Jacob Tilove The anthology and analysis of New York City presents Stateless Housing and urban design and planning for the New York City Department of Housing, Preservation and Development.
How We Live: Free and Clear By Karrie Jacobs. Gefter-Press House with RU 128 by Werner Sobek and Philip Johnson Glass House.
The Gefter-Press House is featured in Metropolis, January 2008 and online at Metroplis. Article by Stephen Zacks. Photography by Bilyana Dimirova.
The Glass House MoleskineSketchbook produced for Philip Johnson Glass House in 2008. Includes Gefter-Press House drawing.
Michael Bell interview by Andrew Benjamin; BOMB, New York; Summer 2004
Design Review: "Drop-Dead Beauty and Luxe, With an Intimate Index of Change" By Roberta Smith. Published: July 2, 1999
"It should be pointed out that there are exceptions to the general spare-no-expense atmosphere. Michael Bell's 900-square-foot ''Glass House @ 2degrees'' may resemble Philip Johnson's glass house, but it was designed to conform to the strict requirements of a Federal housing program for the Fifth Ward of Houston." "They are beautiful esthetic objects, but with the exception of Mr. Bell's glass house and possibly Mr. Denari's metal one, none could be a prototype for a larger community."
Glass House @ 2 Degrees, The Un-Private House, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
32 - Beijing / New York. Issue 1-7: founding editors Michael Bell, Steven Holl, Yung Ho Chang. Princeton Architectural Press.
The Houston Press: Not Your Standard Issue: Architects design one-of-a-kind houses for the Fifth Ward, trying to prove that even lower-end houses don't have to be a cookie-cutter box. By Lisa Gray. Published: November 9, 2000
The First Columbia Conference on Architecture, Engineering and Materials.
September 23-28, 2007
Link: PDF of Program: Documentary Film: Michael Blackwood Productions
Recent Design Studios
Michael Bell / Columbia GSAPP — 2014 and 2018 — Frank Stella's Working Space
As a graduate student at Berkeley had carefully studied Frank Stella's book Working Space with some input from my painting professor David Simpson.
Years later Eunjeong Seong and I contacted Stella and organized design studios framed in part on recovering some of the direction in Working Space. "Mr. Stella" as his team referred to him met us twice over two studios and shared not only his time but incredible energy to discuss his work and that of our studio (and myself).
Teaching can open so many amazing experiences that are often richer when shared. Even over 30 plus years.
Eunjeong Seong / Pratt Institute
Mass Timber and Urban Housing / One of three studios funded by the IDC and Pratt Insitute.
A Rapidly Deployed Epidemiology Clinic
Michael Bell / Columbia GSAPP
2020—A Rapidly Deployable Clinic
2018—The Future of the Truck Stop — Advanced Studio — HuazhouLiu
SCI Arc has recently posted lecture archives on Youtube. In 1994 I had the honor of speaking at SCI Arc soon after moving from Berkeley and San Francisco to Houston. A move from the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley to Rice University School of Architecure. This lecture was introduced by Aaron Betsky. A later lecture at SCI Arc was introduced by Eric Owen Moss. Posted with apprecation of SCI Arc and its influence in giving space to work out ideas in a critical yet generous setting.
