COMMON WORKS ARCHITECTS DREAM THE COMBINE

Located in Oklahoma City, Common Works Architects is currently a team of three led by Asa Highsmith, who grew up in Tishomingo, a small, three-stoplight town near the state’s border with Texas. He later studied architecture at The University of Oklahoma in Norman. Common Works is a small practice, and that’s the point. “We’re always going to be a small firm,” Highsmith told AN. “I turn things down simply for my own happiness. I have limitations. It’s hard to come up with new ideas when you’re inundated by the firehose that is modern media.”

When one thinks of architecture and Oklahoma, the first thought is of the American School as defined by Bruce Goff and later practitioners like Rand Elliott—an adventurous, zany strand of “organic” modernism indebted to Frank Lloyd Wright, but much more twisted. However, the vast majority of buildings in the state are rather banal, defined by strip malls and tract housing. Common Works engages with this bland context to develop an architecture that is quiet, connected to place, and accessible to normal people, while being elevated enough to appear in the upper echelon of design publications.

“In America in general, especially in the middle and the West, we haven’t been around enough to develop a vernacular,” Highsmith said. “You’re in the parking lot of a Best Buy, looking around, and there’s nothing worth caring about. For me it was figuring out where can a vernacular come from. The things that interest me the most, though they’re simulations of simulations, are our Sears, Roebuck housing and all these British/French Tudor–inspired prewar buildings. To me they speak from an era of more hope and positivity than we live in today. Some of the detailing and thoughtfulness that’s there has always resonated with me more than other things I see in our local context.”

One of the most surprising successes of Common Works’ portfolio is the many strong multifamily projects the firm has to its credit—a notoriously difficult typology to do well, especially in this region, but one that is greatly needed. “Oklahoma is affected by the housing crisis. There’s just not enough,” Highsmith said. “We need to ensure that the homes that are here will increase in value and ensure that we create the economic conditions that will enable people to build social connections and capital in the city.” To pull these projects off, Highsmith has teamed with young, first-time developers. “The missing middle is interesting to me,” he said, “and they’re looking to do smaller multifamily development. It’s been perfect to find those people.” AS

Dream The Combine creates immersive public installations that provoke viewers to think critically about their individual and collective relationships to space and mainstream historical narratives.

A 2021 installation in Columbus, Indiana, realized as part of Exhibit Columbus’s New Middles exhibition, demonstrates how firm cofounders Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers merge art, architecture, and (re)education. (The duo are also educators: Both teach at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.) In Indiana, the pair and their team dived into the colonialist subtext of “Discover Columbus!”—a seemingly anodyne roadside sign that welcomes visitors to the city. They link the message to Christopher Columbus’s exploration of the “new world” and Europeans’ subsequent violent colonization of the Americas. To do this, the designers imagined “Columbus” and its associations as nodes in a global network of places named after Columbus. They mapped a sloping lawn using the Mercator projection, positioning empty flagpoles at locations named Columbus, Columbia, Colombo, or Colón. Spiraling text on each pole shares information about each place, prompting visitors to circumnavigate dozens of poles embedded in the hillside.

In Columbus, Indiana—and, largely, in all its projects—Dream The Combine uses hefty materials like steel, glass, and construction textiles to tie its work to infrastructure. But rather than opt for fixity, these elements are animated with movement. For Longing (2015), Newsom and Carruthers installed a mirror within a scrapped piece of Minneapolis’s enclosed skyway pedestrian bridge network to honor the old infrastructure and forge a new network that extends outward and inward. The designers installed movable mirrors on both ends of the skyway that move with only 35 pounds of wind pressure to reflect horizons beyond the desolate surroundings. A short film about the project by regular collaborator Isaac Gale captured the eeriness and the beauty of the skybridge and its surroundings.

A similar technique was in the office’s 2018 installation for Hide & Seek for MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program. Within the museum’s courtyard, mobile mirrored surfaces were set in and among long lines of steel-framed bays, distorting the space’s dimensions. A netted lounging area allowed visitors to see themselves reflected into the distance. The apparatus also extended atop the institution’s boundaries. The architects declare: “We can’t get rid of the infrastructure of these walls, but we can refuse their hold and introduce new conceptualizations of space and occupation.” Audrey

Wachs