Kamilla Csegzi is a Hungarian architect and artist currently based in NYC, creating spaces and objects that bridge between the precarity of people and nature.
Working across the scales of architecture, installations and objects, Kamilla's creative process is instigated by the power of the surrounding material and natural world to shape and define humans, to articulate rituals, movements, behavior, gestures and relationships. To harness this symbiosis, her design engages natural processes like movement of air, growth, sedimentation, evaporation, vitrification, or the decay and transformations of material waste. In the more recent years, her focus has been on research and design with mycelium, the intricate network of thread-like structures found in fungi, that possesses a remarkable ability to transform and adapt. By harnessing the regenerative potential of mycelium, she aims to create pieces that undergo a transformative metamorphosis, reflecting the dynamic and positive change from decay to growth.
Instead of being the form-giver to an object or the follower of a function, her craft gives up part of the control to co-create with nature. The result are pieces with structural integrity while also possessing a living essence, blurring the boundary between living and non-living things.
Kamilla studied Architecture and Urban Design in Bucharest and Paris. Upon graduating, projects have taken her across various places, from Paris and Beijing, to Hong Kong, Singapore and NYC. Upon completing her Masters in Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia University GSAPP in 2015, she was awarded the William Ware and Saul Kaplan Fellowship for Excellence in Design, and was invited to contribute to the Oslo Architecture Triennale ‘After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit’.
While a practicing architect at various studios in NYC, she has collaborated with cultural and academic institutions like The Met, The American Museum of Natural History, the New Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Columbia University. She had started developing her personal research and design work in 2018 as part of the GSAPP Incubator at the New Museum’s New Inc.
Since then, her design work has won various prizes and her installation, ‘The Elements’ designed for the Land Art Generator Initiative, was recently published in the book called 'Land Art of the 21st Century‘.
Her most recent collection of objects, ‘Cultivation’, grown with mycelium and in combination with glass, was part of the ICFF + Wanted Design Manhattan Launch Pad, 2023.