The husband-and-wife team of Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos has been transforming theoretical concepts into functioning buildings since they started Van Berkel + Bos—now unStudio—in 1988. Their roles are complementary: He’s the architect, she’s the architectural historian.

Based in Amsterdam, the firm got its first big break with the Mobius House, a 1998 structure that references the unending strip for which it was named by looping two halves of a house into each other, overlapping and interlocking spaces to create undefined areas for night and day. Van Berkel says that he tries to go “beyond the image alone,” and that in the pair’s work, “it is the organization that makes it unusual.”

unStudio kept designing in Europe, successfully creating complex projects like the asymmetrical single-pylon Erasmus Bridge, in Rotterdam, and, most recently, the Mercedes-Benz Museum, in Stuttgart, a spiral-shaped building that turns the architecture of a parking-garage ramp into a pleasurable space for displaying and looking at cars. Their books, such as the three-volume monograph Move, are a fixture on architecture-school desks, and their output, including a bubble-shaped silver tea set for Alessi, are must-haves for the design crowd.

Still, despite their insider and European cachet, the firm hadn’t conquered America—until last year, when unStudio finished a seven-year project on a private house in upstate New York. Villa NM, as it was called, picked up where the Mobius House left off, with its bifurcation of one box into two volumes, its split-level interior and its seamless transition between the horizontal and the vertical. It made a strong statement. And then, in February 2008, it burned down.

Although the villa can’t be replaced, the team is rebounding with Five Franklin Place, a swooping condominium building slated to open in 2009 in Manhattan. The structure departs from the current trend of sleek starchitect-designed glass boxes by embracing its Tribeca neighborhood’s architectural history with an articulated exterior that reinterprets the area’s cast-iron decorations into functional ribbons that become windows and terraces.They go beyond the image, but create a striking one in the process.

Rumor has it that unStudio is being talked about for a Pritzker Prize, but its attention is focused on the Manhattan project. For van Berkel, who obsesses about organization, the city’s famously planned out streets are both an inspiration and challenge. “I’m excited,” he says. “I’ve always been fascinated by the quality of the grid.” No doubt unStudio will have all the right angles covered—and then some.

"Two for the Road: Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos" originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2008 Table of Contents.