New Talent Circular Reasoning

New Affiliates creates visually pleasing design, but its most interesting work is cerebral.

- Akiva Blander

It may not be clear from the gnomes that greet visitors to their one-room office in Lower Manhattan, but Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb are grappling with some consequential topics. Since they founded the practice New Affiliates in 2016, their portfolio has grown to encompass all facets of design, moving seamlessly from creating residential interiors and exhibitions to navigating bureaucracy and conceptualizing new forms of urbanism and material flows. (The gnomes, meanwhile, are an easel—among a handful of smallscale editions—abstracted from those kitschy American garden dwellers, and retailing for about $300.)

Diamantopoulou and Kolb met while pursuing their MArchs at Princeton, where they overlapped for their thesis semesters and developed a productive if not heated dialogue. Diamantopoulou, a child of architects, studied architecture in Greece, where she managed to complete a handful of residential projects in its less regulated building context. “Greece was all groundup,” she recalls with a tinge of nostalgia. Kolb followed a more indirect route to the field, studying film and urban planning, then writing about architecture (including for