Dream the Combine: Tom Carruthers and Jennifer Newsom

What does it mean to practice architecture?

Jennifer Newsom: Recently, I was talking with Mira Henry and Jerome Haferd about practice as a continual state of becoming. It’s continually evolving, it’s not a static enterprise. We’ve tried to think consciously about the type of work we take on—how we have to design both the work that we do, and also our lives.

Tom Carruthers: Hopefully we’re not defining ourselves only in terms of our work. Practice is about opening up sustained engagement with one’s self. It’s reflective. There have been really challenging moments when I can’t face myself. There are moments when things feel so overwhelming that I need the help of someone else to settle down. That is also where the work gets good, or maybe unpredictable … where vulnerability is important. If we’re in an uncomfortable place, if it feels sort of weird, if it actually feels, then it’s actually worth the investment of building a practice around that feeling.

Dream the Combine designs things, but you also make things. Yet you don’t identify as a design-build practice. Why not?

Jennifer: It does feel like in the world of architecture there’s a division between designing and building, but these two terms are equivalent for us! We care about how things are made. We care about who is making them. The integration between designing and building comes from a deep consideration of process and how things come into being.

Tom: The how doesn’t fully circumscribe the work, or the practice. The rationality of our thinking is not solely what shows up in a set of documents or some text. There’s intelligence and muscle memory. We want to be able to be present at multiple levels of our process … “How can material be formed?” is an open question that includes both craft and experience. What is the eye doing? What are people doing? Where are the invitations and are they legible? Whether you’re talking about design-build, or something else, I just don’t care what it’s called … Is it called architecture? Is it called art? Simply stated … I want to do more of this. You can call it what you want.

Given your design and fabrication interests, affiliations, and experience, who is the primary audience for your work?

Jennifer: The term audience implies directionality and passivity of reception. We are more interested in the work being a platform for an energetic exchange between us and other people. We’re setting up a platform for things to happen. I don’t think of it in a singular direction of experience or knowledge passing from one place or one person to another. Once we make the work … that’s actually the beginning of the project. I get to observe how others engage with our work. That’s when I feel like I’m then the audience. I get to learn about what we’ve made.