In the video, on YouTube, Madonna is seen laying the first brick at a school in Lilongwe, Malawi. But to connoisseurs of architecture, the real star of the video is the man standing next to Madonna, alongside a rendering of the 16-hectare campus. He is Markus Dochantschi, the German-born, New York-based designer of what is called the Raising Malawi Academy for Girls.
Mr. Dochantschi spent seven years working for the architect Zaha Hadid, a larger-than-life figure, learning how to stand outside the spotlight.
Mr. Dochantschi, 42, left Ms. Hadid’s practice in 2002, making him one of a small group of foreign-born architects who have broken away from Pritzker Prize-winning mentors to work on their own in the United States. The ranks include Kulapat Yantrasast, 41, who was born in Thailand, worked for seven years for the Japanese master Tadao Ando and then moved to Los Angeles in 2003. He has already designed one American museum .
And there is Florian Idenburg, 34, a Dutch-born architect who spent eight years working for Sanaa, the partnership of Kayuzo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, designers of the New Museum building in lower Manhattan. This spring Sanaa was awarded the Pritzker Prize, the profession’s highest honor. Just weeks before, Mr. Idenburg and his wife, Jing Liu, won the Young Architects’ competition sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and its Queens affiliate, P.S.1.
The rise of the young architects is good news for the industry, which is in a deep recession .
Mr. Yantrasast apprenticed in Japan. He moved from Thailand to Tokyo to pursue a Ph.D. in architecture. But after hearing Mr. Ando lecture, he followed him to Osaka, in 1996, where he worked on Mr. Ando’s competition entry for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. When Mr. Ando won the competition, he asked Mr. Yantrasast to stick around, and soon he was something of a surrogate son to the childless Mr. Ando and his wife, Yumiko. Mr. Yantrasast left the firm to move to Los Angeles in 2003 .
When the trustees of the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan were looking for an architect for their new building, they wanted someone up and coming - and chose not Mr. Ando but his protege. Mr. Yantrasast attributes his success to luck.
Mr. Dochantschi too has had his share of luck. After studying in Germany, he made several trips to Japan but in 1995 went to work for Ms. Hadid. He described her as a “very demanding but very trusting” boss. In Aachen, Germany, he has designed a $50 million laboratory and classroom building for the University of Applied Science Aachen . He isn’t emulating Ms. Hadid’s style, but more her approach to the profession, which, he said, involves patience and the realization that even a losing competition entry is a way to advance ideas. “This isn’t the art world,” he said. “You can’t expect to be an overnight success.”
Mr. Idenburg agreed that “architecture is a profession of patience,” adding, “For the first 10 years you just hope to survive.”
Mr. Dochantschi said it’s hard for young architects to break away from established firms because their low salaries don’t let them accumulate start-up capital. Then too, “you have to wait until you have enough experience,” he said. “But if you wait too long, you’ll have a family to support.”
He added: “So you have to find just the right moment to jump.”
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
