Metropolis March/April 2022

ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN AT ALL SCALES March/April 2022

NO NATION EMBASSY Danny Ortega, Penn Weitzman School of Design

The Top A&D Students of 2022

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FEATURES The students featured in this issue represent the cream of the crop graduating this year from North America’s architecture and design schools.

Meet the Metropolis Future100.

THE FUTURE100 84 DESIGNING FOR DEATH 96 DONGQI CHEN 98 HOPEFUL HOUSING 100 RADICAL SUSTAINABILITY 108 MATEO MANTILLA 112 FUTURE FEELING 114 EVE TOBEY 118 BUILDING COMMUNITY 120 MEIMEI YANG 124

Reshaping Education by Reshaping Space 134 Creative Schools for Creative Learning 128

A Course Correction 144

DLR Group’s endlessly flexible Canyon High School in Arizona moves far beyond typical learning models.

Niger-based architect Mariam Kamara has created a new Harvard GSD studio based on her practice that could profoundly change design pedagogy everywhere.

For early learners, designers worldwide focus on play and place.

Let’s Get Together 138 Ge Hekai Hall at Wenzhou-Kean University unites students and disciplines.

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FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: COURTESY © KYUNGSUB SHIN; COURTESY BILL TIMMERMAN; COURTESY SETH POWERS; COURTESY KATHLYN KAO / THOMAS KUEI

The Top A&D Students of 2022

POLINA KULIKOVA 106

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p. 40

CONTRIBUTORS 16 IN THIS ISSUE 18 SPECTRUM 24 SOURCED Workplace Wow 36 TRANSPARENCY Special Sources 38

p. 44

p. 54

SUSTAINABLE Endless Summer Breeze 44 HOSPITALITY All that Glitters 54 LIVING Magnolia Nineteen Blossoms 60 INSIGHT The War for Talent 68 FUTURE100 REPORT 72 NOTEWORTHY Katie Swenson 160

On the cover: Penn student Danny Ortega’s No Nation Embassy, a collaboration with his classmate Anna Lim, offers refuge for people of all backgrounds, cultures, and faiths.

MARCH/APRIL 2022, Volume 42, Number 2. METROPOLIS® (ISSN 0279-4977) is published six times a year, bimonthly. Periodical postage is paid in New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post International Publications Mail Product (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 0861642. Publications Mail Agreement No. 40028983. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to circulation department or DPGM, 4960-2 Walker Rd., Windsor, ON N9A 6J3. Postmaster: Send address changes to Metropolis, PO Box 8552, Big Sandy, TX 75755. Subscription department: (800) 344-3046. Subscriptions: Six issues for $32.95 U.S.A., $52.95 Canada, $69.95 airmail all other countries. Domestic single copies $9.95; back issues $14.95.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY ATRA / ALEXANDER DIAZ ANDERSSON; COURTESY CHESTER ONG; COURTESY JEFF LIANG

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METROPOLISMAG.COM More of your favorite Metropolis stories, online daily For MultiHyphenate Designer Alex Proba, No Surface Goes Untouched

Join discussions with industry leaders and experts on the most important topics of the day.

Register for free at metropolismag.com/ think-tank

ETH Zurich’s HiLo Unit Raises the Bar for Sustainable Concrete Design

The Gamble House Looks to the Future of Historic House Museums

The two-story addition to the NEST research building blends medieval construction techniques with digital fabrication technology.

The historic home in Pasadena, California, aims to be more than an icon of the Arts and Crafts style.

@metropolismag

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY STUDIO PROBA; © ALEX VERTIKOFF; COURTESY ROMAN KELLER

The founder of Portland, Oregon– and Brooklynbased Studio Proba sits down with Metropolis to discuss her expansive practice, marketing product design in digital environments, and embracing failure.

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EDITORIAL

SANDOW DESIGN GROUP

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JENNIFER KRICHELS

IAN VOLNER

AUDREY WACHS

Krichels is a writer and editor who has been covering architecture, design, and urbanism for more than a decade. Her writing has been published in Architectural Record, the Financial Times, Interior Design, MOLD, and Designers & Books. She works with architecture firms and organizations on projects including books, educational events, and research, and is managing editor for AIA New York’s Oculus magazine. For this issue, Krichels penned a feature on Ge Hekai Hall at Wenzhou-Kean University (p. 138).

Volner has contributed articles on architecture and design to The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New Republic, among other publications, and is a contributing editor at Architect and Architecture Today (U.K.). He is the author of several books and monographs, and most recently contributed to Jorge Pardo: Public Projects and Commissions, 1996–2018 (Petzel, 2021). Volner’s feature “Creative Schools for Creative Learning” (p. 128) highlights designers’ focus on play and place in early-learning spaces.

Wachs is a New York–based writer, editor, and urban planner who covers new buildings, old buildings, cities, and climate change. She has written for Curbed, Azure, and The Architect’s Newspaper, among others. She’s also currently researching community-based flood resilience planning in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Wachs contributed to this year’s Future100 coverage, exploring the students’ preoccupation with design for healing and memory (p. 96).

COURTESY THE CONTRIBUTORS

CONTRIBUTORS

IN THIS ISSUE Design the total spatial experience from the first moment of encounter to the last moment of interaction.

Bachelor’s Degree (BS) Spatial Experience Design Master’s Degree (MS) Furniture, Lighting and Fixtures Design Spatial Experience Design Spatial Experience Design

Irene Lee

Furniture, Lighting and Fixtures Design

Alex Brokamp

ArtCenter College of Design Pasadena, California artcenter.edu/sxd

Surviving and Thriving At press time, the United Nations estimates that two million people have fled the war in Ukraine. The European Union predicts that the total number of refugees could climb to seven million, which would make it comparable to the crises created by the civil war in Syria and the failed revolution in Venezuela.

As the world once again debates who gets let in and who gets left out, I wonder why there isn’t an institution to succor refugees independent of parochial politics.

2022 Metropolis Future100 honoree Danny Ortega and his classmate Anna Lim—both graduate architecture students at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design— have imagined just such a space in their No Nation Embassy (“Future Feeling,” p. 114, and this month’s cover). By dematerializing building elements and creating moments of surprise, they seem to ask if architecture can better represent human rights if it eschews the marble-and-glass machismo of nationalism.

This is the kind of provocation offered over and over again by this year’s Metropolis Future100, the top North American architecture and interior design graduates of the class of 2022.

Two hundred and thirty-seven students were nominated for this year’s list by their instructors and mentors. In selecting the final 100, Metropolis’s reviewers—SANDOW Design Group EVP and design futurist AJ Paron, executive editor Sam Lubell, editorial project manager Lauren Volker, and I—were especially sensitive to the fact that this cohort had a hybrid or virtual education unlike any generation before them.

But rather than have to make concessions for the disruptions these students have endured in the past two years, we found ourselves marveling at their ability to channel the difficult experience into design solutions. A number of students grasped architecture’s role in helping people deal with loss—University of Pennsylvania graduate students Dario Sabidussi and Yuxuan Xiong (“Designing for Death,” p. 96) showed how this new generation is rethinking memorials and funerary facilities.

Antidotes to social isolation abound in this year’s portfolios as well, with graduates designing community spaces that celebrate diversity rather than flatten people’s differences—see Drexel University student Pooja Kalavagunta’s Shosh Center for Afghan Refugees or Kent State University student Sombre Carleton’ s ABA Autism Center (“Building Community,” p. 120).

These brave young architects and interior designers deserve your support and encouragement as they embark on their careers. We invite you to get to know them in the pages of this issue and on metropolismag.com/future100.

Our focus on learning continues with a series of stories on design for education (p. 127). From elementary schools (“Creative Spaces for Creative Learning,” p. 128) to higher education campuses (“Let’s Get Together,” p. 138), these buildings are sites for experimentation in both architecture and pedagogy. Here’s hoping they continue to nurture the courage and ingenuity we will need to thrive in the face of mounting ecological, political, and social challenges. —Avinash Rajagopal, editor in chief 18

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Kengo Kuma’s architectural intervention on Gaudí’s Casa Batlló

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PHOTOGR APHY: JORDI ANGUER A , BARCELONA .

The Japanese architect has covered the new 8-story staircase of the modernist building with a second skin of aluminum chain links.

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What’s Next for Color Two trend experts share how they forecast for the future.

Every designer wishes they had a way of knowing what the future will look like, how we will live, how we will work, and how we will want the spaces we occupy to make us feel five, ten, or even twenty years from now.

Looking to the future is an essential part of designing spaces that are meant to stand the test of time, but it’s not always an easy task. Trends appear and disappear constantly and divining the future of design from its ever-changing present is a full-time job— just ask Sue Wadden, an expert trend forecaster and director of color marketing at Sherwin-Williams.

Each year, Wadden and her team assemble the Colormix® Forecast, a collection of forecast hues that describe the zeitgeist of color.

They scour the design world for inspiration and insight, evaluating research, interviewing architects, designers, and stylists, and travelling to trade shows around the world. They also look beyond paint trends, paying attention to product design, industrial coatings, fashion, flooring, and architecture.

This year, the team saw that the design world is at an inflection point. “Designers and architects are at the forefront of this sea change we are all living through,” Wadden says. With that in mind, her team built a collection of palettes that incorporates of-themoment design trends and opens space for a discussion of what’s next in design. It’s called MODE, a collection of four unique palettes: Method, Opus, Dreamland, and Ephemera, each signifying a macro trend or aesthetic direction that design will take in the future.

Method presents a selection of natural neutrals and warm hues that represent sustainability and the idea of the natural home. Opus is a maximalist palette with darker hues and dramatic jewel tones. Dreamland represents the digital shift, with some filtered colors and cooler color temperatures. The final palette, Ephemera, captures our nostalgia,

Opus features darker hues and dramatic jewel tones for designers looking to make a statement.

taking cues from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, while updating them for a new generation of designers.

Further refining these colors into palettes that professionals can apply to hospitality, new residential, healthcare, education, and multi-family settings is the job of Emily Kantz, fellow forecaster and Sherwin-Williams color marketing manager, who oversees development of the Commercial Colormix® Forecast.

“For hotels, we selected deeper moodier shades to capture a more dramatic backdrop for guests to enjoy,” she says, “whereas for offices, we wanted to encourage designers to create workspaces that have that sense of comfort and security while being away

from home with a palette full of warm neutrals and rich earth tones.”

Most thought leaders would agree that sustainability, technology, and the residentialcommercial convergence are growing movements in design. But how will those translate into the aesthetics of architecture and interior design? That’s what sets the Colormix® Forecast apart—the Sherwin-Williams team invests research, time, and their passion for color into distilling trends, themes, and notions into palettes that inspire. The result is a tool that allows designers not only to stay on top of current trends, but to focus on creating experiences that are relevant, essential, and timeless.

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Welcome each wondrous transition and explore the full 2022 color forecast at swcolorforecast.com © 2022 The Sherwin-Williams Company

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At All Scales

COURTESY HAT & BEARD PRESS

To view the ceramics, public sculpture, and furniture of American artist and designer Peter Shire is to revisit the history of visual culture in Los Angeles. In his latest book, Peter Shire: Towers with Ranch Dressing (Hat & Beard Press, 2022), Shire uses the typology of the tower as a symbol of his life and work as a Southern California native.

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SPECTRUM An essential survey of architecture and design today

PETER SHIRE: TOWERS WITH RANCH DRESSING Edited and designed by Peter Shire and Lisa Tchakmakian Hat & Beard Press 472 pages, $125

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BOOK From Teapots to Towers Perhaps best known for his involvement with Ettore Sottsass and his Italian design and architecture group Memphis at the height of Postmodernism, Los Angeles native Peter Shire remains an iconic figure whose playful attitude and radical irreverence continue to push boundaries while subverting ideas of taste and defining California culture and design.

Although a handful of books on Shire’s work—particularly his ceramic teapots—exist, an unprecedented volume, Peter Shire: Towers with Ranch Dressing, takes a deep dive into the artist’s fascination with tall buildings as a symbol of his life and work in L.A. “Los Angeles began as a pueblo surrounded by land grants—or ranchos—from the king of Spain,” Shire says, explaining the book’s title. “There still remains an aspect of the rancho system—land which sometimes

translates into real estate and has made a goofy mess of pop culture crossed with avarice, confused aesthetics and objectives in building and style. What could make for more of a goopy mess than ranch dressing?”

With an introduction by the artist and original essays and contributions from Andrew Berardini, Anna Katz, Bobby Klein, Jim Heimann, Aaron Rose, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the book is oversaturated with sketches and drawings, images of Shire’s public sculptures in and around L.A., tall towerlike teapots, and archival photography of various towers sprinkled throughout the Southern California landscape.

“I adore towers. They are giant jungle gyms for adults, always attracting my attention, whether I’m walking, driving, or flying,” Shire says. “Towers to the max.”

–Leilah Stone MARCH/APRIL 2022

COURTESY HAT & BEARD PRESS

Peter Shire: Towers with Ranch Dressing evaluates the ways in which towers have influenced the artist’s work as signifiers of “nostalgia, joy, memory, and anxiety.” Utilizing film stills, archival photography, collages, and sketches, the book provides a rich snapshot not only of Shire’s career but of California culture. The book will be published in a special edition of 1,000.

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SPECTRUM

Rarely one to take on a residential project, Ratti made an exception for this converted farmhouse and granary (hence the property’s name, Greenary). Its focal points include a 33-foot-tall ficus and a floating steel stairway.

RESIDENTIAL Arboreal Living

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of the building’s volume, lavished with six skylights.

By the tree’s base is a 40-foot-long table of fossilized kauri pine. Paired with handcarved cedar stools and pushed against a new glass wall on the building’s southern flank, it’s at the same elevation as the surrounding meadow.

Meaning an evening’s aperitivo spread might be exactly eye level with a curious Piero, the resident donkey.

The gutted and newly reconfigured interior’s seven interconnected rooms are in direct dialogue with the tree, with perforated glass and brick walls and weathered steel rods providing subtle spatial division without blocking light. Resin flooring embedded with soil and orange peels—a technique Ratti developed for the Italy Pavilion at Dubai’s recent World Expo— expands the natural feeling. “This was a little bit of experimentation with a new type of organic resin we developed thinking about locally sourced, zero-distance architecture,” Ratti explains.

Following Spain, Italy is Europe’s second-largest orange producer.

—Mairi Beautyman

COURTESY DELFINO SISTO LEGNANI AND ALESSANDRO SALETTA FROM DSL STUDIO

Following the renovation and expansion of a historic farmhouse in Parma, Italy, its residents now dine beneath the leafy boughs of a towering indoor tree.

Rising almost three stories, the 33-foot-tall ficus sends a burst of green over the open-plan living, dining, and kitchen areas of the 5,400-square-foot house, owned by Francesco Mutti, CEO of international tomato sauce brand Mutti, and his family.

“The client has a number of animals and is deeply engaged with the countryside,” explains Carlo Ratti, founding partner of Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA), who conceived a design driven by biophilia in collaboration with Italian architect Italo Rota.

The tree, called Alma (“soul” in Spanish) by the client, grows from a rectangular bed of grass at the center of a sun-dappled wing, where weathered steel that Ratti selected for its “aged finish that evokes the farmhouse’s history” drops down the retouched and repainted brick-and-plaster facade. To better accommodate the tree, the design team specified a new metal roof, seven feet higher than the rest

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SPECTRUM

EXHIBITION Presenting As Male Last month, one of the most hotly anticipated exhibitions in the U.K. opened at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear, developed in partnership with Gucci, celebrates “the artistry and diversity of masculine attire and appearance” through various media, including a bronze Auguste Rodin sculpture, the Renaissance Portrait of Prince Alessandro Farnese, and iconic fashion campaigns, as well as film and performance.

The V&A tapped local architect and designer Jayden Ali of JA Projects to design the exhibition, keeping in mind the goal of “challenging the idea of historical masculinity as portrayed within British institutions,” Ali explains. In the first gallery, he notes, “you’re presented with all of these cisgender white male bodies [represented] in the objects, while five-meter-high drapes are printed with deconstructed black male bodies—fragments of limbs, torsos, and 28

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thighs. It’s a pretty incredible thing.”

While many of the objects and outfits on view represent “conventional” masculine attire, the exhibition also points to the fluidity of dress and gender expression, whether through Harris Reed’s Fluid Romanticism collection or a photograph of nonbinary musician Sam Smith donning pearls.

Ali notes that while the earth tones of the first gallery reference the origins of man and “the revelation of the body,” the cool blue curtains and generous presence of glass in the final third represent industrialization, the Anthropocene, and “where fashion meets the city.” Here, Ali hopes to remind viewers of “the incredible amount of energy it takes to produce glass, but also the carbon-hungry existence that underpins [urban life] and the fabrication of garments.”

—Giovanna Dunmall MARCH/APRIL 2022

LEFT TO RIGHT: COURTESY AMY GWATKIN; COURTESY ADEBAYO OKE-LAWAL © ORANGE CULTURE

The Victoria & Albert Museum’s latest exhibition, Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear, was designed by local architect Jayden Ali of JA Projects with the goal of challenging the social, historical, and environmental intersections of fashion and masculinity. Pictured: Craig Green’s spring 2021 collection (left) and Orange Culture’s autumn/ winter 2020 Flower Boy two-piece set (right).

SPECTRUM

LIGHTING Endless Options Suspended, mounted, or kinetic— pure cylindrical forms become brilliant luminaires in the solutions offered within Cyls, a collection from Spanish manufacturer Estiluz in collaboration with Mermelada Estudio. Utility and capacity for customization are robust because the LED fixtures are available as pendants, sconces, or uplights, and in table- and floor-lamp versions. Standard satinlike finishes include black or beige, while some options can be specified with a white pearl translucent polyester shade and a black polished marble base.

Corded lamps feature an on/off switch, whereas hardwired fixtures can be made dimmable. estiluz.com —Joseph P. Sgambati III

The billowing, mouth-blown glass shades of Lodes LED Flar diffuse a rich glow reminiscent of traditional storm lanterns.

Conceived by French designer Patrick Norguet for the Venetian heritage lighting company, Flar marries decorative objects with forwardthinking lighting design. The bulbous shades, available in

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18.5 and 24.6 inches, sit atop a 3D-laser-cut base that blooms beneath them in metallic finishes of Champagne and Terra, reflecting accents of pink, orange, and brown. The cable-mounted power switch features a dimmer to modulate intensity and ambience. lodes.com —J.S.

MARCH/APRIL 2022

COURTESY THE MANUFACTURERS

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SPECTRUM

EDUCATION Sensory Solution Birmingham, U.K.–based design studio Dual Works has completed a new creative space for people with complex disabilities, including deaf-blindness, in a project that rethinks “the interface between arts and social care.”

Designer-makers Zoe Robertson and Steve Snell have created flexible storage systems, flip-up desks, and a mobile art cart for a community center in Birmingham, U.K., called Sense TouchBase Pears. In the process, the pair has had to learn how people with multiple impairments use their senses to communicate and understand their world.

The project, which opened in late 2021, embraces tactility and inclusive design. Large braille panels with contrasting colors create sensory spaces that are both aesthetic and functional, with orange used to reference the branding identity of the client, the nonprofit organization Sense.

The designers were inspired by how users of the art studios read stories to one another through objects and materials kept in story bags. “We’ve never been comfortable with anything that is kept behind glass,” says Snell. “We’re interested in things you can touch and experience. We wanted to create openness, beauty, and design quality.”

Robertson adds: “Social care settings can be very stark and clinical and don’t actually function for the groups that use them. Our client wanted to change that and bring warmth to the space.”

Aspects of the Dual Works design will now be adopted in other Sense arts buildings across the U.K. According to Stephanie Tyrrell, the Sense group’s head of arts, these spaces will ensure “people with complex disabilities are creative leaders, now and in the future.”

—Kim Megson

COURTESY ALLAN TOFT

Design studio Dual Works used birch plywood to give furnishings a calming tone, while ample use of pegboards allows users to curate the space, displaying equipment such as musical instruments and SUBPACs, which generate sound and vibration.

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Rock solid flooring design.

Introducing the Granite Mountain™ Collection Interface’s new biophilic flooring collection harnesses the versatility and uniqueness of nature. Taking inspiration from the strength and beauty of granite, these carpet tile designs provide a solid foundation for any space.

Like all Interface products, Granite Mountain is carbon neutral across its full product life cycle through our Carbon Neutral Floors™ program. interface.com/granitemountain

SPECTRUM

A design firm specializing in “using light and darkness to enhance the visual environment” has activated the dynamic, forest-inspired facade of Copenhagen’s new wood-burning power plant.

Speirs Major’s lighting design for the BIO4 facility, which is located only a mile from the city’s downtown, is meant to draw the public’s attention to the Danish capital’s transition to renewable energy.

The building, designed by Gottlieb Paludan Architects, is clad in hanging tree trunks, creating a thicket that is 19 feet deep. A prominent staircase takes visitors from ground level up through the trees and to the roof, providing views into the plant’s interior along the way, and across to neighboring Sweden from the top.

“We wanted a very natural effect,” says Speirs Major senior partner Keith 34

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Bradshaw. “We really liked the idea that you are looking into a forest at night, and it is beautiful and enticing, but at the same time kind of unsettling. Often in stories about forests— be it ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ The Blair Witch Project, or even Bambi—you have that sense of being beckoned in. When you get close to this facade, you really do feel like the light of a forest is moving through. It is very, very suggestive.”

Designed to be a symbol for the city, the plant is lit in tones of warm white under normal circumstances but transforms into a dramatic red on Danish Constitution Day and a striped rainbow during Pride.

“The effect is really special,” says Bradshaw. “The building has this ability to say, ‘We’re part of this city and we’re part of this nation.’ ” —Kim Megson

By day, natural light creates a dappled shadow effect through the trees (above). After dark, layers of immersive illumination continually shift in speed, focus, and intensity to cast patterns that never appear the same way twice (top). The Speirs Major team relied on extensive testing and physical and virtual modeling to design the installation, but it was executed partly using traditional theatrical projection techniques.

MARCH/APRIL 2022

COURTESY ALLAN TOFT

PUBLIC ART Urban Forest

Taking care of light Marset USA Inc. 20 West 22nd Street – Suite 903 New York, NY 10010 T +1 646 727 4250 I F +1 646 304 6959 marsetusa@marset.com

SOURCED Workplace Wow Energetic colors and radical patterns are hallmarks of Kiyonda Powell Design Studio’s nontraditional office environments.

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Kiyonda Powell

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After nailing interiors for her first designer show house (the Aspire House in McLean, Virginia) and the Hyattsville, Maryland, mayor’s office, Powell has gained a following for her uniquely vibrant vision.

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01 BuzziShade pendant “The on-brand pink acoustic shade material made this fixture a must for the Oakland, California, office of Black Girls Code (BGC), a nonprofit tech organization that works with young women.” buzzi.space 02 Collector’s shelving “The warmth of the brass frame grounds the space and creates balance in contrast to bright white and bold colors.” amuneal.com

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04 Rive Droite chair “To echo the playfulness of seating in BGC’s existing New York office, a Cappellini chair by Patrick Norguet adds a fun Pucci fabric here in Oakland.”

1stdibs.com

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05 Bon Pouf ottoman “I scattered cubes and poufs around the space for quick huddles.” us.hem.com

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06 Caribbean Galaxy Sisters, giclée print on paper “For a client drawn to Afrofuturism, this piece by Yermine Richardson made for a soul-stirring focal point in the conference room.” popcaribe.com

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07 Engineered Plycore flooring “The oak pattern provided a foundation for the rest of the design.” shawcontract.com 08 Lazlo rug “It makes one area feel like a living space; and the pattern is reminiscent of coding ‘chatter.’ ” romo.com 09 Coco table “Clusters of three tables are perfect for informal team gatherings.” bludot.com

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PORTRAIT COURTESY KIYONDA POWELL; PRODUCTS COURTESY THE MANUFACTURERS AND DESIGNERS

03 Bay Area Toile wallpaper “Since the office is in Oakland, a wallcovering with area icons (especially Angela Davis!) was a fun way to reference the Bay Area.” flavorpaper.com

Muro wall panels team up the finest Italian leather with custom options including stitching, fluting, beveled edges, and laser engraving. Choose from hundreds of colors in thirty-two leather qualities to offer endless bespoke possibilities. spinneybeck.com/custom-muro

TRANSPARENCY Special Sources Tiles by San Diego–based LIVDEN contain 65 to 100 percent recycled content and are decorated using the company’s proprietary low-impact printing process, resulting in products worthy of LEED credits.

By Kelly Beamon

01 TRACEABILITY

Using content from suppliers that already qualify as green helps LIVDEN trace its own material safety.

02 REDUCED CARBON FOOTPRINT

To cut transportation-related emissions, suppliers of the base tile bodies are all domestic.

03 RECYCLING

Producing LIVDEN’s porcelain collection creates a market for postconsumer tiles (collected by partner firm Crossville), recycling more waste than is generated.

04 LANDFILL DIVERSION

Tapping partners’ wastereduction programs means LIVDEN has helped redirect 12 million pounds of material away from landfills.

05 WATER CONSERVATION

In cutting, printing, and finishing the art tiles, LIVDEN uses recycled water.

06 RAINFOREST ALLIANCE SEAL

LIVDEN Once apprentices in their mother’s tile business, LIVDEN’s sibling cofounders Georgie Smith and Hilary Gibbs developed a special printing method for recycled tile bodies, then partnered with ecofriendly suppliers to source their castoffs. Here’s what that process yields.

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07 U.S. GREEN BUILDING COUNCIL AFFILIATION

Suppliers of LIVDEN’s terrazzo and porcelain tiles are members of the USGBC, which administers the system.

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COURTESY LIVDEN

This organization certifies that the ingredients in PaperStone (a collection made of 90 percent recycled melamine and 100 percent recycled paper) are socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable.

Crossover brings the interest of architectural facades indoors with three-dimensionality and linear patterning. With heaps of wool felt color choices, this modular wall product soaks up sound and installation couldn’t be easier. filzfelt.com/crossover

PRODUCTS If You Can Make It There. . .

In time for NYCxDESIGN, here’s a sampling of spring product debuts, including some hitting Manhattan showrooms.

By Kelly Beamon

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01 PICO BOIS RED AND BLUE DOTS The indoor/outdoor collection of polka-dot tile originally designed by the Bouroullec brothers 11 years ago has been extended with a version that features a wood-pattern background on the tile body.

MUTINA stonesource.com

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COURTESY MUTINA

New York City’s NYCxDESIGN Festival turns ten, in time for its return to a spring schedule this May. At Metropolis, nostalgia for in-person showroom crawls has turned our thoughts to our local design week’s unique energy. Major tone setters appearing in the city’s showrooms are the product design collaborations on view. French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec are linked to several debuts across brands. One of their recent collaborations? A wood-look extension of Pico Bois, a tile collection they initially designed in 2011 for Mutina. Find more launches, including some unveiled during New York’s festival, in this preview.

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COURTESY THE MANUFACTURERS AND DESIGNERS

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02 SERENA DUGAN OUTDOOR The cheery Modernist pattern, inspired by paintings by its namesake artist and textile designer, is newly available in a durable weather-resistant fabric.

SERENA DUGAN serenadugan.com

03 IQUO CAFÉ STACKING ARMCHAIR Seating in Knoll’s new indoor/outdoor café collection, Iquo (pronounced E-kwo) by Ini Archibong, boasts glass-filled nylon framing, Clean Air Gold certification, and an armless option.

KNOLL knoll.com

04 CAULE This floor lamp by super collaborator Patricia Urquiola is engineered for use outdoors (hence the design, which mimics a flower and stem). It’s also available as a bollard for in-ground installations.

FLOS usa.flos.com

05 BULLY A leather-wrapped base and handblown glass shade distinguish this moody, dimmable table lamp.

BLU DOT bludot.com

06 DINE OUT A family of chunky outdoor tables by Rodolfo Dordoni can pair an optional rectangular teak top (shown) and dramatic conical bases of concrete or terrazzo that can be specified with matching teak legs.

CASSINA cassina.com

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PRODUCTS If You Can Make It There...

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07 NORTHSTAR MAST The innovation behind this umbrella is manufacturer TUUCI’s state-ofthe-art update to its mechanical structure.

TUUCI tuuci.com

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08 PERFORMANCE FABRICS The Brooklyn-based studio is rolling out its first collection of outdoor, commercialgrade performance fabrics—all featuring digitally printed patterns on durable, water-repellent, stain-resistant polyester.

ESKAYEL eskayel.com

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09 ATRA CHAIR Despite its indoors-y, postwar Modern style, Atra was designed for use outside. Available in hardwood with leather cushions or custom materials.

ATRA atraform.com

10 CIRCLE 02 Architecture firm Crosby Studios collaborated with manufacturer Yellowpop on this LED neon sign. The 24-inch circle is part of a limited-edition, three-piece “neon art” collection.

YELLOWPOP yellowpop.com

COURTESY THE MANUFACTURERS AND DESIGNERS

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11 HAYES COFFEE TABLE This walnut table is finished with brass sheeting to emphasize its dramatic form. The bold profile extends Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams’s collection.

MITCHELL GOLD + BOB WILLIAMS mgbwhome.com

12 BRISA This Lievore Altherr Molina–designed steel and aluminum LED is inspired by bluebell flowers. It’s available in surface-mount or built-in versions in two finishes.

VIBIA vibia.com

13 BENT LOUNGE AND TUBI TABLE Lazzoni, showing during NYCxDESIGN, offers a range of custom options on furnishings that weather well outdoors for office or recreational settings.

LAZZONI lazzoni.com

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14 BEOSYSTEM 72-22 As part of its Recreated Classics program, Bang & Olufsen is releasing 30 of these limited-edition music systems, complete with a cabinet for vinyl record storage and a turntable originally designed

by Jacob Jensen in 1972.

BANG & OLUFSEN bang-olufsen.dk.com

15 EGG TABLE Fritz Hansen is celebrating its 150th anniversary by reinterpreting Arne Jacobsen’s iconic Egg table with an FSC-certified walnut veneer top.

FRITZ HANSEN fritzhansen.com

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SUSTAINABLE Endless Summer Breeze The University of California, Santa Barbara’s Henley Hall Institute for Energy Efficiency takes a user-centered approach to natural ventilation.

COURTESY BRUCE DAMONTE

By Russell Fortmeyer

Climate is often the first box you need to tick when naturally ventilating a building— either the hours of occupancy align with good weather conditions or they don’t. “If you can’t make natural ventilation work in central Santa Barbara County, where can you?” asks Jordan Sager, the University of California, Santa Barbara’s campus energy manager. Situated directly on the Pacific Ocean, the university has climate on its side. Cool, breezy summers, manageable humidity, and mild winters help explain why the campus boasts several academic and residential buildings with passive ventilation for cooling, often coupled with radiant heating systems.

This was the approach UCSB tasked KieranTimberlake with for Henley Hall, a new 49,900-square-foot academic laboratory building opened in August 2020 to house the school’s Institute for Energy Efficiency. A combination research and teaching lab, with supporting lecture spaces and offices, the LEED Platinum structure sits on the north edge of campus, along with a series of other science and engineering facilities.

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JUST RIGHT BRIGHT A flanking facade combines solid terracotta with a gradient of vertical striations, protecting from solar exposure but still letting natural light filter inside.

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SUSTAINABLE Endless Summer Breeze

INSIDE (SORT OF) Classrooms and collaboration spaces in the east wing open to a concrete-clad, three-story atrium that allows natural air to flow through all of its public zones.

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COUNTERCLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: COURTESY JEFF LIANG (2); COURTESY BRUCE DAMONTE

The three-story building is divided into two blocks: the “active” block of lab spaces to the west, and the “passive” block of offices to the east. Jason Smith, KieranTimberlake’s design lead for the project, says the building’s east–west orientation allowed its programs to take advantage of north-facing glass facades with clear views of the Santa Ynez Mountains in the distance while incorporating time-honored solar control strategies on the south elevation. Lab spaces vary from wet and dry to computational labs, including an experimental data center, all contributing to a research mission focused on the application and commercialization of energy-efficient technologies.

A large brise-soleil defines the exterior of the passive block, with louvered vertical and horizontal extensions of the terra-cotta facade framing the south elevation. That treatment addresses summer sun angles and reduces peak temperatures along the perimeter. A central atrium defines the block’s interior, separating individual offices along the north and a lecture hall, conference spaces, and open offices along the south. The concrete-finished atrium is technically an exterior space, protected against weather but entirely naturally ventilated with a series of automated windows in a clerestory along the top to

A collection of brands. All in perfect harmony. kimballinternational.com/perfectharmony

SUSTAINABLE Endless Summer Breeze

LEFT: COURTESY BRUCE DAMONTE (2); RIGHT: COURTESY JEFF LIANG

ENSURING SHADE Terra-cotta brise-soleil projects beyond a south facing glass-curtain facade.

VARIED FRONTS Depending on orientation, glazing stands alone or is protected by terra-cotta fins and applied fritting.

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Expormim —— (212) 204-8572 usa@expormim.com www.expormim.com

Lapala hand-woven chair. Lievore Altherr Molina & Atrivm dining table. Manel Molina —— Photographer: Meritxell Arjalaguer ©

SUSTAINABLE Endless Summer Breeze

FLEXING FOR SCIENCE Flexible, open labs contain large glass walls as well as exposed utilities in anticipation of future upgrades.

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found on the passive block’s north elevation, but without operable windows. Since the labs produce high internal heat loads, the project’s engineers, Buro Happold, optimized the U-value performance and surface area of the glazing for the northfacing labs so those spaces could lose heat during Santa Barbara’s mostly cool days. The glazed facade also exposes the inner workings of the labs to the wider campus community, a realization of a desire for “science on display,” as Smith says.

Kim Fiffer, Buro Happold’s mechanical engineer for the project, says the labs vary between active chilled beams in spaces without fume hoods and variable air volume systems where fume hoods require higher air demands. All chilled water is provided by centralized campus systems, while hot

COURTESY BRUCE DAMONTE

provide an exhaust path. The individual offices to the north include operable windows to bring fresh air in from the exterior, with smaller apertures in the doors on the interior wall. “This allows flow-through ventilation without having the privacy concerns of having to open the doors,” says Smith. Each office incorporates a ceiling fan, which aids cooling on warmer days, and flat-plate hot-water radiators to discreetly provide heating when needed. According to Sager, it’s a simple, user-centered approach to comfort for academic offices that has worked well across the campus.

The active block’s north elevation has a stucco-clad exterior with punched windows to minimize solar gain in its more lightsensitive laboratory spaces. Its north side incorporates the expansive glazed facade

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L IC H E N C OM M UN IT Y Lichen Community embodies Mohawk Group’s commitment to beyond carbon neutral with an additional 5% carbon offset for a net-positive impact. Leveraging our Duracolor Tricor fiber and EcoFlex One backing, Lichen Community is our lowest embodied carbon product to date. mohawkgroup.com

OPEN-ENDED The east wing’s south facade (above) is protected by deep brise-soleil and a bosque of African tulip trees. A breakout space (left) opens to natural light and air.

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water is heated by gas-fired boilers located in a mechanical penthouse.

The team credits a relentless focus on energy efficiency with helping them reach an ambitious target—an energy use intensity (EUI) of only 100 kBtu/sf-year compared with the university’s average for existing labs of nearly 300. That achievement is one of the reasons it’s a rare lab building to achieve a LEED Platinum rating, even rarer to include natural ventilation. Currently, the team is reviewing metered operational data, but it has taken more time given the uneven occupancy of the building with pandemic shutdowns. Smith says the engineers who work in the building call it “fresh and clean,” which has struck a particular chord as designers everywhere have started paying more attention to indoor air quality during the pandemic. M MARCH/APRIL 2022

FROM ABOVE: COURTESY BRUCE DAMONTE; COURTESY JEFF LIANG

SUSTAINABLE Endless Summer Breeze

systema

staccato Lightly scaled geometric elements form expansive intersecting or linear constructions of modern minimalism in a variety of configurations with a range of available luminaires. Crisp rectilinear bars support minimal tubular elements with luminous trims, extensions, or shaded reflectors for general and directed lighting functionality.

EXPLORE THE POSSIBILITIES: sonnemanlight.com SHOP ALL OF OUR AWARD-WINNING COLLECTIONS AT OUR NEW WEBSITE.

U.S. and Foreign Patents Pending

HOSPITALITY All That Glitters ARGO Hong Kong layers eclectic pieces to form a tactile, glamorous whole.

By Catherine Shaw

It’s never easy when you’re asked to reinvent an icon. Yet Hong Kong architects and interior designers AB Concept didn’t hesitate when commissioned to transform the renowned Blue Bar at Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong into ARGO, an all-day dining space and cocktail bar.

The design studio’s cofounder Ed Ng had once frequented the original bar—a sophisticated retreat designed in 2005 by Wilson Associates, often filled with patrons from the nearby financial district. He seized the opportunity to change not only the look but the layout too, shifting the bar to face the window and make the most of the spectacular Victoria Harbour views.

COURTESY CHESTER ONG

ARGO’s bar, oriented toward views of Victoria Harbour, contains 136 illuminated glass vitrines, holding the establishment’s collection of rare spirits. Suspended terraria, ceramic coated wallpaper, and curved nickel-plated fixtures contribute to an exotic aesthetic that feels both classic and new.

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Spills. Splatters. Supreen. Outperforming in the places and spaces where life hits hard.

Supreen fabrics offer unparalleled performance with a total liquid barrier, bleach resistance, and stain protection. Fluorocarbon Free and HHI Compliant.

Learn more at www.supreenfabric.com.

The cocktail lounge’s plush seating, handcrafted paper insects, and mirrored surfaces all reinforce the feeling of a modern conservatory.

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COURTESY CHESTER ONG

HOSPITALITY All That Glitters

HOSPITALITY All That Glitters

But first the designers had to decide what to do with the 8.2-foot-wide concrete column in the middle of the panorama. Unable to hide the massive, load-bearing obstruction, they turned the constraint into an opportunity, making it the main element of the new double-height bar, clad with 136 illuminated glass vitrines housing the establishment’s prized collection of rare spirits. Seventy-two of the cylinders revolve and open, adding a theatrical touch.

The designers’ exuberant flair is evident throughout the 2,745-square foot interior, including the open-plan lounge wrapped around the bar, and in the quirky, semiprivate cocktail lounge where paper sculptures in the shape of insects by Japanese-Canadian artist Raku Inoue are scattered.

Drawing inspiration from Gilded Age botanical conservatories, ARGO—which takes its name from the Greek myth of Jason 58

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and the Argonauts, who sailed a boat named Argo in search of the Golden Fleece—feels like a modern city garden with neoclassical architectural curves, rich textures, and soothing pastel hues. Glazed ceramic coated wallpaper covers the walls and lacquered and mirrored surfaces offset intricate marble and nickel-plated fixtures, all of which combine to provide a tactile, layered aesthetic. Almost everything is customdesigned, from the plush velvet stools and soft leather banquettes to the intriguing terraria suspended above them. Bespoke lighting fixtures, such as glowing halos that radiate around the bar column and terraria that transform into lighting at night, allow staff to adjust the atmosphere according to the mood and the time of day.

“I wanted to create an immersive space using the concept of an urban garden that unifies and allows for a smooth transition

from the communal bar to the snug banquettes in the lounge and the private space into one environment, bringing different elements together in ways which could still operate at any time of day or night,” says Ng. Working with the hotel’s beverage manager, Lorenzo Antinori, the designers devised a flexible, uncluttered layout that would facilitate easy movement and give ARGO multiple roles, from relaxing breakfast spot to late-night cocktail destination.

(Inventive design features include hidden counter trays for breakfast, which get covered when mixologists take over at night.)

“The greatest challenge is to create an interior that sparks curiosity, that makes people crave to be there,” says Ng. “For us, that meant breaking away from traditional hotel bar concepts to create something with a strong personality, but where the food and drinks are center stage,” he adds. M MARCH/APRIL 2022

COURTESY CHESTER ONG

Many of the bar’s cylindrical glass vitrines (left) revolve and open. The glamorous bathroom (right) features jewel-like shapes and marble surfaces.

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CELEBRATING 75 YEARS OF TILE EXCELLENCE. Daltile’s history is paved with milestones that led to us becoming the world-class leader in Tile, Natural Stone & Countertops. As we celebrate this milestone, we are proud of the achievements we’ve made, and we look forward to many more years to come.

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LIVING Magnolia Nineteen Blossoms Los Angeles firm Brooks + Scarpa shapes a new mixed-use corner “guardian of the block” building in the San Fernando Valley.

By Jessica Ritz

The intersection of Magnolia and Colfax is a microcosm of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. With neighbors that include a public high school, a fast-food restaurant, various small businesses, and multifamily residential buildings, Magnolia Nineteen, a mixed-use building designed by Brooks + Scarpa, respects context while also differentiating itself from the extant built environment.

The site, which formerly housed a gas station, shaped the firm’s approach. “Corner buildings are the guardian of the block,” says Lawrence Scarpa, lead designer and principal-in-charge. “If you have a bad corner building, you lose the whole block. If you have a good one, it enhances it.” The Flatiron Building, for example, has a very different impact from a blocky tower.

COURTESY TARA WUJCIK

Magnolia Nineteen is a mixed-use, multifamily housing project designed

by Brooks + Scarpa in Los Angeles. Located on a corner site that formerly housed a gas station, the project contains three stories of apartments and 1,600 square feet of retail on the ground floor.

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LIVING Magnolia Nineteen Blossoms

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COURTESY TARA WUJCIK

Managing principal Angela Brooks echoes the importance of the site. “You would hope it could be an example for the rest of the street to build a little bit more densely along those boulevards,” she adds. Magnolia Nineteen represents a potential paradigm shift for the Valley Village neighborhood, and by extension the broader area, to embrace creative approaches to mixed-use development. Zoning restrictions that regulate the interface of where commercial uses abut R-1 single-family blocks dictated the footprint too.

“The idea was that the building could flow but also feel open,” Scarpa explains of the three-story structure containing 19 market-rate housing units placed over 1,600 square feet of commercial retail space. The building, developed by Hillock Land Company, boldly gestures toward the street while creating a series of shared and private

The building features a unique facade consisting of layers of perforated aluminum that provide residents with sun shading, cross ventilation, and privacy while still allowing for optimized views from the units as well as the outdoor walkways, rooftop, and recessed balconies.

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Palette Workplace planning and usage is in flux with many open questions about the future of the office. Palette addresses this uncertainty head on. Designed in collaboration with STUDIOS Architecture, this truly versatile system is suitable for private office, shared office, conference and huddle room applications.

12’ lattice wall with whiteboard, veneer and Fenix NTM tiles; technology mounts; veneer sit/stand monocolumn desk; veneer tech-integrated huddle table.

WWW.INNOVANT.COM

LIVING Magnolia Nineteen Blossoms

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functions as a screen. As Scarpa observes, “it’s a bit ephemeral [how] the light passes through.” Breezes also circulate effectively, which is important given that summers in the San Fernando Valley can reach punishingly hot temperatures. The skin provides needed shade, privacy, and aesthetic interest as shadows shift throughout the day.

Exterior walkways and ramps connect the entrances to the units on the second

COURTESY TARA WUJCIK

outdoor spaces for tenants in the forms of walkways, courtyards, roof decks, and recessed balconies. The stepped-back profile and asymmetrical volumes seem to effortlessly rise out of the largely transparent, visually lightweight ground floor.

Perforated and corrugated aluminum panels that compose the facade undulate with restraint. This composition lends a sculptural quality to the building and also

Of the 19 units, 12 feature single-level, open-plan apartments, six are double-height lofts, and one unit is a three-story loft.

Large areas of glazing and operable windows maximize daylighting and optimize building performance.

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Sustainable spaces to inspire young minds

Kawneer is at the forefront of innovation for sustainable building materials and is driving positive change by practicing environmental responsibility.

Our façade solutions are manufactured using a minimum of 40% recycled aluminum content and are shaping learning environments for the next generation.

Interact with our extensive range of aluminum system solutions and discover how they can be utilized in educational settings.

KAWNEERK-12SUSTAINABILITY.COM

LIVING Magnolia Nineteen Blossoms

and third levels and encourage interaction and engagement. The strategically oriented massing supports environmentally sensitive passive building systems, too. Inside, lowemission materials include no-VOC paints, formaldehyde-free MDF cabinetry, and natural linoleum.

Twelve of the units are single-level, open-plan lofts that range from 800 to 1,000 square feet, along with six doubleheight dwellings located on the third floor, and a single three-story unit. To preserve the pedestrian-scaled focus, parking is tucked away behind the street-facing ground floor, with separate designated areas for residential and commercial use.

(The commercial-tenant parking lot turned out to be a pandemic lifeline for the current

occupant, a kickboxing gym that hosted classes outdoors.)

“We always try to make the ground floor more inviting, more urban-friendly,” Scarpa says, so the lobby entrance maintains a close visual relationship with the sidewalk. Landscaping by PLAN(t) Studio, Brooks + Scarpa’s landscape design arm, and Tina Chee Landscape Studio adds to the softened, welcoming street appeal.

Danny Kradjian, principal and founder of Hillock Land Company, reflects on Brooks + Scarpa’s unique ability to deliver project objectives: “Our goal was to partner with an architect that had an imaginative vision to meet the unique site challenges, while prioritizing appropriate scale, form, and sustainability.” M

Selected Sources • Design Architect: Brooks + Scarpa • Structural Engineer: John Martin Associates • Landscape Architects: PLAN(t) Landscape Studio & Tina Chee •D eveloper: Hillock Land Company EXTERIOR •M asonry: Angelus Block Company •M etal: CR Laurence Inc. •W ood: Weyerhaeuser, Trus Joist Corporation, Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified oak indows: Milgard, Fleetwood, U.S. •W Aluminum Corporation •S kylights: Bristolite, Solatube International Inc. •R oofing: CertainTeed Corporation INTERIORS • Kitchen: Formaldehyde-free MDF and FSC-certified oak •B ath Fittings: American Standard, Kohler, Bobrick, GROHE, Delta all Finishes: AMF Safecoat, USG •W • Flooring: Ecotile by Walker Zanger • Appliances: GE, ISE, Bosch, Fagor, Bertazzoni, Toto • Lighting: Shaper, BEGA, Prudential, Stonco, Belfer, Delray Lighting •C ontrols: Lutron

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COURTESY TARA WUJCIK

Indoor air quality was considered when specifying healthier interior materials such as formaldehyde-free MDF cabinets, no-VOC paints, natural linoleum, and LED lighting.

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LACAVA .com

INSIGHT The War for Talent Three ways the design industry can seize this moment and champion working parents.

By Amanda Schneider

Mamava is a good example of a business that addresses the needs of working parents—it has thousands of freestanding lactation spaces around the United States, and an app that helps breastfeeding parents find them.

ADVOCATE FOR MENTAL HEALTH The pandemic has exacerbated many of the challenges working parents already faced. And as I write this, the Omicron variant is surging everywhere, closing schools and making parents feel as if it’s impossible to have both a kid and a job in this era—again.

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“We have this ‘lean-in generation’ of working parents who have to speak up and be willing to do what the generation before us had a harder time doing. Part of which is saying ‘This is what we need to be successful.’ The next generation of parents should not have to ask, ‘How can I do both?’ ” said Nikkie Kent, CRO of Mamava, in a recent ThinkLab Clubhouse session.

Here are a few ways you can advocate for mental health for working parents: 01 M ake sure home office setups are adequate. Support expectant and breastfeeding parents with the information they need to be successful when they return to work.

02 Consider creating a remote-working guide for parents with tips and tricks to navigate working from home with kids.

03 Find ways to create community, through Facebook or organizations like ASID or IIDA. MARCH/APRIL 2022

COURTESY MAMAVA

Late hours, crazy deadlines, pressure to network—the real estate and design industries can make it challenging for working parents to find enough time in the day. As many firms begin rethinking norms and policies, we have an opportunity to reflect and consider when, where, how, and even why we work.

I—along with a small but mighty army of working parents in the Chicago area—want to challenge our industry to think bigger. We are poised for change, especially during “The Great Resignation” and as the war for talent heats up. The pandemic showed us that time is our greatest asset, and with this in mind we believe we can build inclusive policies and practices that can attract talent to our industry. Here’s how:

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INSIGHT The War for Talent

DRIVE INCLUSIVE POLICY CHANGE Perhaps our biggest takeaway from the past year is that the pandemic gave more parents the chance to work from home, and now they don’t want to give it up.

“Working parents are the most productive people in the whole world,” said Liz McCleary, vice president and cofounder of Working Parents Collective at CBRE, in a recent ThinkLab Clubhouse session.

“Employers don’t have to doubt that we will get the job done. The more we can normalize the conversation about altered working hours and healthy boundaries, the more it will benefit everyone.”

ThinkLab data suggests that the majority of A&D firms intend to remain on the hybrid spectrum, with three out of four consistently stating that they plan to allow their employees to work remotely one to four days per week. But as we learned in season 2 of our podcast Design Nerds Anonymous, hybrid is the hardest. One of the key elements in policy change is getting hybrid work to work well, and this includes creating a culture that allows for digital equity.

things that employers can do to make for an easier transition back, such as creating well-designed spaces to support the physical needs of breastfeeding parents.

“You often see a lounge chair and side table,” said Silja Yanz, health-care designer, Chicago, in a recent ThinkLab Clubhouse session. “In the design industry we are accountable for time sheets and billable hours, and we often have to work while pumping.

We need a table, task chair, appropriately positioned outlets, the opportunity for various postures, and adjustable lighting.”

As we look to create more inclusive policies and spaces to help working parents succeed, it’s important to be persistent. “If you see improvements that can be made within your organization, figure out how to reach the people who can make those changes,” Yanz said.

“Don’t give up if the first answer is no. If companies understand policy and special arrangements that cater to needs within this season of life, they will have a greater chance of retaining top talent.”

DESIGN PHYSICAL SPACES FOR INCLUSIVITY One of the hardest days of a working parent’s life is the day they leave their baby to return to a physical office. But there are many

Amanda Schneider is president of ThinkLab, the research division of SANDOW Design Group. Join in to explore what’s next at thinklab.design/join-in.

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REPORT

COURTESY SARAH COSTON

Six of this year’s Future100 students study at the University of Pennsylvania. Shown here, the robotics lab in Penn’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

Following the debut of the Future100 program in 2021, Metropolis set out once again this year to designate the top graduating architecture and interior design students in the United States and Canada. The program, sponsored by CannonDesign, Daltile, Formica, Keilhauer, Rapt, SherwinWilliams, and SOM, invited the most talented students from the class of 2022 to apply. The final 100 are featured in this issue.

Nominated by their instructors and mentors, these 56 interior design and 44 architecture students were chosen by the Metropolis team. They hail from some of the best schools in North America, from Tuskegee University to California College of the Arts, and call anywhere from Orlando, Florida, to Toronto home. A diverse group—with many identifying as female, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, or neurodiverse—they are leaders on their campuses, advocating for equity and inclusion through their work and extracurriculars.

On the following pages, we give you a broad look at this group of talented young designers: who they are, where they come from, and what and where they study. Then see the full list of winners (p. 84) and dive deeper into their impressive work (p. 96) to get a glimpse of what the future of the A&D industry could be.

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SCHOOLS Where Do They Study?

METROPOLIS FUTURE100 REPORT

Launching a search across the United States and Canada, we reached out to deans, professors, and advisers at architecture and interior design programs, to find the top students from the class of 2022. Enthusiastic nominations came flooding in from leading schools throughout North America.

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INTERIOR DESIGN STUDENTS

ArtCenter College of Design Auburn University British Columbia Institute of Technology California Baptist University California College of the Arts California State Polytechnic University, Pomona College for Creative Studies Cornell University Drexel University Fashion Institute of Technology Florida State University Georgia State University Illinois Institute of Technology Indiana University Bloomington Iowa State University Kansas State University Kent State University Marymount University Miami University New York Institute of Technology New York School of Interior Design Pratt Institute Purdue University Rice University Rochester Institute of Technology Ryerson University Samford University Savannah College of Art and Design Savannah College of Art and Design Atlanta School of Visual Arts Syracuse University The Boston Architectural College The Cooper Union The George Washington University The University of Texas at Austin Tuskegee University University at Buffalo University of Florida University of Massachusetts Amherst University of Minnesota University of North Carolina Greensboro University of Pennsylvania University of Southern California Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Tech Woodbury University

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METROPOLIS FUTURE100 REPORT

ACADEMICS What Do They Study?

DIVERSITY What Do They Say About the Future?

Pursuing undergrad or graduate degrees in architecture and interior design, the Future100 students also demonstrate passions for other creative outlets—from painting and photography to lighting and furniture design—as well as interests in areas of study such as urban planning, accessible design, and sustainability.

These top students advocate for equity and inclusion through their work and extracurriculars, and many identify with groups that are underrepresented in the A&D professions.

ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS INTERIOR DESIGN STUDENTS

BIPOC 16 13

FEMALE 19 49

46% Undergraduate

10% Graduate

20% Graduate

10% of students held leadership positions within their AIAS, ASID, IIDA, or NOMAS campus chapters, or within another architecture or interior design organization.

Judging Criteria The most talented students from the class of 2022 submitted their academic accomplishments, a portfolio, and testimonials from an instructor or a professional mentor. Applicants were required to be enrolled in an accredited architecture or interior design program at a public or private college in the United States or Canada, be working on studio-based or research-based projects, and be in good academic standing. Student submissions were reviewed by the Metropolis team and judged on their creativity, rigor, and professionalism.

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NEURODIVERSE 9

24% Undergraduate

76

LGBTQIA+ 3

1 1

ARCHITECTURE STUDENT INTERIOR DESIGN STUDENT

“Sophie Clapperton is exceptional—she is a deeply reflective designer who evaluates economic, social, and climate data to create a synthetic response that solves pragmatic problems, ennobles the inhabitants, and strengthens community.”

KAREN NELSON, Dean, School of Architecture, Boston Architectural College

“Optimism, kindness, and human-centered focus are evident throughout Ashley Chen’s work and if this is an indication of her future direction—which I think it is—then my own sense of hope for the design field and its place in the world, too, remains high.”

IGOR SIDDIQUI, Program Director for Interior Design, The University of Texas at Austin

“Throughout her four years as a design student Lauren Shaul has shown considerable interests and sensitivities to design inclusive interiors that consider the spectrum of users, their abilities, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic backgrounds.”

LINDSEY BAHE, Interior Design Program Director, University of Nebraska–Lincoln MARCH/APRIL 2022

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METROPOLIS FUTURE100 REPORT 14

GEOGRAPHY Where Are Their Schools?

With wide-ranging geographic and cultural backgrounds, the Future100 study anywhere from New York to San Francisco.

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13 27 31 23 29 04 07 39 ARCHITECTURE STUDENT INTERIOR DESIGN STUDENT

Ames, Iowa Amherst, Massachusetts Arlington, Virginia Atlanta, Georgia Auburn, Alabama Austin, Texas Birmingham, Alabama Blacksburg, Virginia Bloomington, Indiana Boston, Massachusetts Brooklyn, New York Buffalo, New York Burbank, California Burnaby, British Columbia Chicago, Illinois Detroit, Michigan Gainesville, Florida Greensboro, North Carolina Houston, Texas Ithaca, New York Kent, Ohio Lincoln, Nebraska Los Angeles, California Manhattan, Kansas New York, New York Oxford, Ohio Pasadena, California Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Pomona, California Richmond, Virginia Riverside, California Rochester, New York Saint Paul, Minnesota San Francisco, California Savannah, Georgia Syracuse, New York Tallahassee, Florida Toronto, Ontario Tuskegee, Alabama West Lafayette, Indiana 78

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Where Are They From?

Alabama Banten Beijing British Columbia California Connecticut Florida Georgia Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Lima Maryland Michigan Minnesota NCR/Metro Manila Nebraska New Jersey New York North Carolina Ohio Ontario Pennsylvania Rhode Island Seoul South Carolina Taipei Texas Virginia Wisconsin

ARCHITECTURE STUDENT INTERIOR DESIGN STUDENT

MARCH/APRIL 2022

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The Future of Architectural Work Three architecture firms sketch out a vision for how the next generation of designers will practice.

Architectural work today takes many different forms. At Rapt Studio, a firm that combines architecture and interiors with branding as well as website and graphic design, the office reflects that eclecticism.

COURTESY RAPT STUDIO

By James McCown

TOP: COURTESY LAURA PETERS/CANNONDESIGN; BOTTOM: © SOM

A two-year pandemic and big changes in how architects work mean that design students are graduating into a field rife with uncertainty.

Though it can be an intimidating time to be looking for a job, progressive design firms are taking big steps to improve the experiences of young architects who join their workforces.

Discussions with three very different architecture firms—Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), CannonDesign, and Rapt Studio—yielded anecdotal evidence of robust hiring practices in the coming year, after a lull in recruitment during the worst days of the pandemic.

Along with that uptick in hiring comes a suite of initiatives like flexible work schedules, diversity-oriented recruitment, and an abundance of mentoring, to make full-time architecture work jibe with the next generation’s understanding of what a job should be.

Gone are the days of working long hours and late nights in the office, and it’s not only the pandemic that has given workers the flexibility to work from anywhere. According to Adam Semel, a managing partner in SOM’s Chicago studio, his firm’s flex work policy allows employees to choose two days a week to work from home, shift their schedule by two hours a day for a flexible daily routine, and even work remotely two weeks out of the year, in addition to paid time off. “Had the pandemic never happened, we still would have put a remote work policy into effect,” he says. “It supports the individual doing their best work while creating autonomy for them.”

That autonomy, along with new mentoring practices and hiring initiatives, will be key to attracting and retaining the next generation of designers that the profession needs to thrive during the current building boom.

“This year may be a record in terms of new hires,” says Charlene Miraglia, director of human resources at CannonDesign. “This contrasts with 2020, which was pretty quiet due to the pandemic. Work was constantly stopping and starting; it was like hitting the gas pedal and the brakes at the same time.”

To find their next employees, all three firms are expanding their search both to find top-tier talent and to build a more inclusive design profession. “We want a diversity of viewpoints, and we’ll find the best talent out there by looking as broadly as we can,” says Semel, who also says that SOM has come a long way since the 1950s and ’60s, when the firm employed mostly men from the Ivy League.

“We cast a wide net now,” he adds. “We recruit at schools all over the country. We continue

Left: Young designers brainstorm ideas at CannonDesign; in recent years the firm has launched several initiatives to support new hires.

Below: Architects explore SOM’s expansive material library.

to transform ourselves and embrace new ways of thinking.”

Both SOM and CannonDesign have forged relationships with historically Black colleges and universities to recruit African-American candidates. These include Howard University in Washington, D.C., and the Atlanta University Center Consortium.

Miraglia shared that CannonDesign has been trying to diversify leadership teams, seeing more women and minorities take such posts: “We’re really intentional about spreading leadership opportunities for the diverse range of talent we have here.”

For Rapt Studio, an unusual firm with a broad range of services that includes not only architecture and interiors but branding, website design, naming, and graphic design, recruiting is about finding unique talents and points of view. “[We’re looking for] an innate curiosity that makes a person want to do things differently,” says David Galullo, the firm’s CEO and chief creative officer. “Our process relies on having multiple points of view, multiple backgrounds.”

At all three firms, new hires can expect the sort of mentoring programs that help young architects develop as professionals and transition from the relative freedom of being students to the more structured, if now flexible, lifestyle of working in an office.

Miraglia points to a suite of programs CannonDesign has launched to support its younger designers: “We have programs like CannonDesign Academy and New Hire Buddies.

We also do a lot of well-being programming with a heavy focus on mental health and stress reduction.” They’re also launching a support group for employees working toward their license. At SOM, Semel says, it’s the firm’s Year One program: “It’s an initiative that brings an incredible range of exposure and experience, everything from supporting licensure to asking new employees to give a presentation of their school or early career work.”

As for Rapt, “Our studio kind of defies description in many ways,” says Galullo. “We offer a diversity of mentoring from different design directors and teams. Team members are not just getting a single experience—they’re getting multiple experiences. A young architect might be mentored by a graphic designer, or vice versa.”

The most important thing for young designers, Galullo points out, is to start building those relationships with coworkers and team members, whether virtually or in person.

He says, “The last few people we’ve hired have opted to do an in-person onboarding to immerse themselves in all of the relationships they’ll need to start building.”

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MAY 10–20, 2022

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Representing 45 colleges and universities, the projects that appear on the following pages are a sampling of those submitted by 100 students who have produced some of the best work in North America’s graduate and undergraduate architecture and design programs. While their processes, visualization strategies, and depth of research are impressive, the fact that each concept was executed amid a two-year pandemic makes the outcomes even more powerful, be they an emotionally charged memorial or a transformative affordable housing complex.

Meet the class of 2022.

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MARCH/APRIL 2022

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THE FUTURE100

GLIMPSE Ashley Chen, The University of Texas at Austin 84

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COURTESY ASHLEY CHEN

The 100 students listed on the following pages represent some of the most talented young designers graduating from North America’s architecture and design schools this year. They have not only proposed beautiful, well-designed spaces and buildings of all types but also pushed the discourse forward with an emphasis on community, inclusivity, and sustainability. Presenting thorough research and fresh methodologies, and demonstrating attention to materiality, context, and culture, these students are ones to watch as they set out to make their mark on the industry.

ARIELLA AHDUT School of Visual Arts Undergraduate Interior Design

JULIA BOHLEN Miami University Undergraduate Architecture

LIYA RACHAL CHANDY University at Buffalo Graduate Architecture

KEVIN CHOW The Cooper Union Undergraduate Architecture

NOMINATOR: Carol Bentel, Chair, BFA Interior Design: Built Environments

NOMINATOR: John Blake, Professor of Community Engagement, Director of Miami University Center for Community Engagement in Over-the-Rhine

NOMINATOR: Samina Raja, Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning Director, Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab Associate, and Dean for Research and Inclusive Excellence, School of Architecture and Planning

NOMINATOR: Guido Zuliani, Distinguished Professor in Architecture

From a sustainable urban living solution to a restorative justice project, Ahdut seeks to create healthier communities and drive change through her designs.

ALAA ALHARBI Drexel University Graduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: William Mangold, Program Director Alharbi takes an eclectic approach, creating timeless designs that deliver interesting stories and prioritize well-being and sustainability.

SARA ALVAREZ New York School of Interior Design Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Ellen Fisher, Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs Alvarez’s body of work reveals an elegant design sensibility with attention to color, line, and form in spaces spanning hospitality, retail, and workplace typologies.

ALLISON BAKER Kent State University Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Tina Patel, Assistant Professor of Interior Design

Bohlen believes that design should strive to improve lives through a holistic approach that considers people and places, contributing to a healthier and more equitable future.

BROOK BOUGHTON (P. 100) Pratt Institute Graduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Alexandra Barker, Assistant Chairperson of Graduate Architecture With thorough contextual research that delves into human and material histories, Boughton seeks to enhance each site’s inherent qualities while prioritizing environmental concerns.

LEONIE BRIGHTLY Virginia Commonwealth University Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Kristin Carleton, Assistant Professor and Interim Administrative Director of Interior Design Brightly’s body of work includes lively, vibrant interiors with a sensitivity to human needs and attention to detail that enhance the user experience.

SOMBRE CARLETON (P. 120) Kent State University Undergraduate Interior Design

Chandy seeks to create inclusive and culturally relevant spaces, such as a homeless shelter that offers support for substance abusers and underground pods designed for meditation.

ASHLEY CHEN The University of Texas at Austin Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Igor Siddiqui, Program Director for Interior Design Chen’s work is whimsical yet practical, offering solutions that respond to program and client needs but also incorporate colorful forms, patterns, and materials.

MARIA CICONE Rochester Institute of Technology Undergraduate Interior Design

Cicone’s designs for hospitality interiors, workplaces, public spaces, and more demonstrate a sensitivity to human scale and an awareness of the role design plays in shaping experience.

A Dales Fellowship recipient, Chen believes in the capacity of architecture to act as a public tool and an active player in building resilience, community, and a sustainable future.

ELINA CHEN (P. 100) Rice University Undergraduate Architecture

Carleton demonstrates a commitment to immersive, creative design that reflects the diversity of our world and supports the health and well-being of others.

Thoughtful and well organized, Chen’s body of work demonstrates innovative material use and offers a fresh perspective on architecture’s ability to build community.

KIMBERLY CARLISLE (P. 100) California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Undergraduate Architecture

JIANG CHEN University of Nebraska–Lincoln Undergraduate Interior Design

From a pedestrian-based urban experience to an affordable, multigenerational housing solution, Carlisle’s body of work promotes community with a holistic approach to urban planning and residential development.

Integrating architectural and anthropological research methodologies, Chung presents a thoughtful and creative body of work from a refugee center to migrant domestic worker accommodations.

NOMINATOR: Andrew Saunders, Associate Professor, MArch Program Director

SARAH BANNON Virginia Tech Undergraduate Interior Design

NOMINATOR: Rodolfo Reis Dias, Temporary Instructional Faculty

NOMINATOR: Lawrence Chua, Assistant Professor

NOMINATOR: Mary Golden, Undergraduate Program Director and Associate Professor of Interior Design

NOMINATOR: William Willoughby, Architect, Associate Professor of Interior Design

Bannon’s passion for drawing and painting is evident in her creative, expressive presentations of spaces ranging from a multiple sclerosis spa to a veterans’ living community.

KRISTABEL CHUNG (P. 100) Syracuse University Undergraduate Architecture

DONGQI CHEN (P. 98) University of Pennsylvania Graduate Architecture

With an approach rooted in thorough research and understanding of context, Baker creates empathetic sensory experiences within workplace, education, and community spaces.

NOMINATOR: Lisa M. Tucker, Chair, Interior Design Program

Chow’s deep desire for knowledge and understanding of the discipline is evident in his thoughtful, artfully presented design process backed by thorough research.

NOMINATOR: Nathan Friedman, Principal; 2021–23 Wortham Fellow

NOMINATOR: Lindsey Bahe, Interior Design Program Director From a portable classroom to an office that helps employees transition smoothly from home to in-office work, Jiang demonstrates an affinity for navigating the dynamic nature of design.

SOPHIE CLAPPERTON (P. 108) Boston Architectural College Graduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Karen Nelson, Dean, School of Architecture Clapperton’s proposal for an amphibious community for the Kashechewan First Nations people of Northern Ontario, Canada, is an inventive project that demonstrates how a deep understanding of cultural context can affect design.

ANTHONY COTIGNOLA Drexel University Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Rachel Schade, Associate Program Director, Architecture With a portfolio of projects based on real sites in and around Philadelphia, Cotignola demonstrates an eye for local context and a talent for three-dimensional problem-solving.

MARCH/APRIL 2022

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ARIANNA DANTES Florida State University Undergraduate Interior Design

PAIGE FROST The University of Texas at Austin Undergraduate Interior Design

NOMINATOR: Amy Huber, Associate Professor

NOMINATOR: Igor Siddiqui, Program Director for Interior Design

Detailed floor plans, lifelike digital renderings, and refined material palettes demonstrate Dantes’s abilities as an emergent interior designer.

Frost’s design for a multipurpose transit center in Austin, Texas, with cement surfaces in circulation areas and warm wood tones in hospitality spaces demonstrates a close attention to materiality.

VENESSA DAVIDENKO (P. 120) California College of the Arts Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Antje Steinmuller, Associate Professor and Chair Davidenko’s talents as a young architect are on display in complex digital renderings and intricate physical models of educational institutions, public installations, and urban residential projects.

LINDSEY DECATREL Fashion Institute of Technology Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Jack Travis, Adjunct CCE Professor As an interior design student, Decatrel has interests ranging from high-end retail to supportive housing, and present throughout her portfolio is an eagerness to create designs that delight and inspire.

MORGAN DIMOUSH University of Florida Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Genesis Okken, Instructional Assistant Professor “I believe every space is a blank canvas,” writes Dimoush. It’s an apt sentiment for a young designer who displays a firm grasp of color and composition in renderings, floor plans, and mood boards.

ALEXIS FRIEDMAN College for Creative Studies Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Sandra Olave, Department Chair of Interior Design

NOMINATOR: Carol Bentel, Architect, Partner, Bentel & Bentel Architects; Chair, BFA Interior Design Department, School of Visual Arts Highlights of Geng’s portfolio include a low-carbon micro apartment and an audio sculpture that makes music as wind passes through tensioned cables.

GHAZI GHAZI California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Hofu Wu, Professor of Architecture/Director, Environmental Design Technology Unit

WORKPLACE HEADQUARTERS CONCEPT COLLAGE Morgan Dimoush, University of Florida

Displaying skill with digital drawing and rendering technologies, Ghazi’s portfolio also demonstrates a passion for sustainable design.

BENJAMIN GOLDSMITH Cornell University Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Felix Heisel, Assistant Professor of Architecture; Director of the Circular Construction Lab Proposals for clustered intergenerational housing, a campus wellness center, and a climate research center all show Goldsmith’s passion for using design to solve problems and improve users’ lives.

CHRISTOPHER GUARDADO New York Institute of Technology Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Trudy Brens, Professor Displaying a high level of technical ability and a passion for urbanism, Guardado’s portfolio of large-scale projects is impressive for its fully realized designs.

DENICE GUILLERMO (P. 108) University at Buffalo Graduate Architecture

MICAELA ROSE HEAD Virginia Tech Undergraduate Interior Design

NOMINATOR: Annette LeCuyer, Professor

NOMINATOR: Lisa Tucker, Professor and Chair, Interior Design

Guillermo’s lively sketches and renderings illustrate a portfolio that demonstrates her interest in using design as a tool for sustainable change.

ABBY HARVEY Virginia Tech Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Lisa Tucker, Professor and Chair, Interior Design For her thesis, Harvey designed a health and wellness center for a multigenerational population in Singapore, developing a comprehensive design for a facility rooted in extensive research.

Schemes for hospitality, residential, and retail projects in Head’s portfolio show this young designer’s ability to develop material palettes and design briefs into complete spaces.

SELENA HELMS Purdue University Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Barbara Young, Assistant Professor A self-identified Black, queer woman, Helms is passionate about accessibility in interior design. She says, “It’s important that in the future we are designing interior spaces and making them inclusive for all.”

COURTESY MORGAN DIMOUSH

With a design language influenced by internet aesthetics like vaporwave and retro design styles from the ’70s and ’80s, Friedman brings designs to life with exuberant renderings and collages.

XIRAN GENG School of Visual Arts Undergraduate Interior Design

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EUGENE KIM Savannah College of Art and Design Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Challie Schafer, Professor of Interior Design Kim brings an artistic sensibility to his work, translating concepts into thoughtful interior design details through impressive drawing skills. He also pursues furniture design as a passion project.

CAINE KNUCKLES California College of the Arts Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Antje Steinmuller, Associate Professor and Chair Study models, computational iterations, and detailed diagramming illustrate Knuckles’s skill in navigating the design process from start to finish.

POLINA KULIKOVA (P. 106) University of Southern California Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Lawrence Scarpa, Professor

TIMBER GARDENS Matthew Kennedy, New York Institute of Technology

An artist and architecture student who grew up in Russia, Kulikova presents a body of work that displays a keen interest in the ways architecture and art overlap.

YOUSEF ISMAIL New York Institute of Technology Graduate Architecture

POOJA KALAVAGUNTA (P. 120) Drexel University Graduate Interior Design

SALMA KATTASS New York Institute of Technology Graduate Architecture

ABBEY KUNSELMAN University of Florida Undergraduate Interior Design

NOMINATOR: Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Director, MS in Architecture, Computational Technologies Program, and Associate Professor

NOMINATOR: William Mangold, Program Director

NOMINATOR: Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Director, MS in Architecture, Computational Technologies Program, and Associate Professor

NOMINATOR: Genesis Okken, Instructional Assistant Professor

ALEX JONES Tuskegee University Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Kwesi Daniels, Department Head of Architecture A former vice president of the National Association of Minority Architects student organization at Tuskegee, Jones displays an interest in cultural heritage and sustainability throughout his portfolio.

RACHEL KAMKHEHJI Fashion Institute of Technology Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Joseph Goldstein, Adjunct Assistant Professor With an appreciation for texture, material, and color, Kamkhehji designs eye-popping ceiling and lighting treatments for her hospitality and restaurant projects.

COUMBA KANTÉ Syracuse University Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Michael Speaks, Dean Having previously worked at Elkus Manfredi Architects, Kanté has a deep understanding of construction drawing, 3D modeling, and building technologies.

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A junior architect and Fulbright grantee, Kattass utilizes methods such as 3D scanning and point cloud collection to research and represent the spatial experience of various New York museums.

MATTHEW KENNEDY New York Institute of Technology Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Giovanni Santamaria, Chair, Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Design From multifamily housing to cultural centers, the projects in Kennedy’s portfolio illustrate the role that natural light, outdoor spaces, and landscaping play in occupants’ well-being.

Kunselman’s design philosophy is centered on ideas of joy, ease, and storytelling.

Dedicated to human-centered design, she believes that when it comes to interior design, function and beauty go hand in hand.

ELVIRA LATHROP The University of Texas at Austin Graduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Igor Siddiqui, Program Director for Interior Design Lathrop uses light, color, and biophilic elements to create atmospheric interiors ranging from a music center to a low-carbon spa.

JAEWON LEE ArtCenter College of Design Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Emil Mertzel, Professor, Architect With an approach rooted in empathy, multiculturalism, and sustainability, Lee believes that architecture has the power to positively affect people’s lives.

MARCH/APRIL 2022

COURTESY MATTHEW KENNEDY

Ismail has been studying architecture since 2014 and has a firm grasp of the technologies used in contemporary practice, from modeling and rendering to 3D scanning and photogrammetry.

Kalavagunta’s portfolio features multiple award-winning projects that prioritize community and care, from a center for Afghan refugees to a West Philadelphia health and wellness center.

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CHARLOTTE MCGRAW Virginia Tech Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Lisa Tucker, Interior Design Program Chair A passion for drawing, painting, and photography is evident in McGraw’s portfolio of interior concepts.

KATHRYN MERTA University of Minnesota Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Meghan Hendrickson, Professor/Lecturer The diverse interiors in Merta’s portfolio reflect a strong interest in sustainability and indoor planting.

MARY CLAIRE MORAVITS (P. 120) The University of Texas at Austin Undergraduate Interior Design

MAZYCK INTERIORS Aleah Mazyck, University of North Carolina Greensboro

BECKY LUNG New York Institute of Technology Undergraduate Architecture

MATEO MANTILLA (P. 112) Savannah College of Art and Design Graduate Architecture

NOMINATOR: Rodolfo Reis Dias, Temporary Instructional Faculty

NOMINATOR: Giovanni Santamaria, Chair, Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Design

NOMINATOR: Anthony Cissell, Chair of Architecture

An accomplished cabinetmaker and woodworker, Lemus demonstrates a fine attention to detail and craft in each of his designs, whether they are modeled physically or digitally.

Lung’s portfolio shows a capacity for deep user research: City Paradigm, a community center concept developed with classmates Naomi Codo and Katie Trainor, is designed to reduce the stigma of food insecurity.

XINZE LI (P. 114) School of Visual Arts Undergraduate Interior Design

VIRGINIA MACOY Auburn University Undergraduate Interior Design

NOMINATOR: Carol Bentel, Chair, BFA Interior Design: Built Environments

NOMINATOR: Anna Ruth Gatlin, Assistant Professor

Through two projects that center the needs and experiences of formerly incarcerated individuals, Li’s work displays a dedication to both ecological and restorative justice.

President of student chapters of ASID and IIDA, Macoy has a portfolio reflecting her belief in interiors that promote health and wellness.

SARAH LOBO University of Florida Undergraduate Interior Design

UMAR MAHMOOD (P. 114) University of Pennsylvania Graduate Architecture

NOMINATOR: Genesis Okken, Instructional Assistant Professor

NOMINATOR: Andrew Saunders, Associate Professor and MArch Program Director

“Design affects how people feel, move, and breathe,” Lobo writes. With this in mind, the projects in her portfolio explore play, color, and the emotional impact of interior design.

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Mahmood references fractal geometry to innovatively update conventional concepts, like melding man-made residential towers and natural landforms.

Mantilla’s background includes an internship with Leo A. Daly and an award for a concept of vertically distributed public spaces, designed with classmates Ellen Filiatreau and Erin Legan.

LAURA MASCHINO Iowa State University Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Jae Hwa Lee, Assistant Professor, Interior Design Anticipating real-world needs, Maschino’s design solutions emphasize flexible furniture, multi-use spaces, and built-in technology.

ALEAH MAZYCK University of North Carolina Greensboro Undergraduate Interior Architecture

Moravits’s portfolio illustrates her talent in placemaking and keen grasp of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on interiority, especially in her Japanese restaurant concept Akachochin.

DANIELA MUJICA University of Florida Graduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Genesis Okken, Instructional Assistant Professor Mujica’s visions of “in-between spaces” for hybrid work and toy stores that “encourage learning” reveal her strong research skills, honed studying political science and international affairs as an undergrad.

EUNA OH Savannah College of Art and Design Graduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Challie Schafer, Professor of Interior Design This Gensler research fellow brings lessons from that experience to a set of beautifully rendered, wellness-informed concepts for workplaces and health-care facilities.

NOMINATOR: Lucinda K. Havenhand, Department Head and Professor Mazyck’s study of marketing and fine art in addition to interior architecture is apparent in work that addresses users’ behavior, emotions, and quality of life.

COURTESY ALEAH MAZYCK

NOAH LEMUS (P. 100) California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Undergraduate Architecture

NOMINATOR: Igor Siddiqui, Program Director for Interior Design, Associate Professor of Architecture and Interior Design

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From architecture to animation, furniture design to film and television, SCAD offers inspirational spaces that catapult your creative career.

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DANNY ORTEGA (P. 114) University of Pennsylvania Graduate Architecture

URBAN TREE NURSERY Forrest Rall, University at Buffalo

NOMINATOR: Andrew Saunders, Associate Professor, MArch Program Director Fascinated that architecture can’t be “defined through a singular form of media,” Ortega has created a portfolio that proposes new hybridized typologies, illustrated in extraordinarily captivating models and drawings.

VIVIANE PEDRUCO Marymount University Graduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Jessica Bonness, Assistant Professor, Interior Design Whether developing designs for a workplace, a residence, or a hospitality venue, Pedruco brings originality and liberal doses of color to create dynamic interiors.

NICOLE PUENTE-SOLÍS University of Florida Graduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Genesis Okken, Instructional Assistant Professor A desire to serve her surrounding community informs Puente-Solís’s contributions to a team portfolio of biophilic public and work spaces.

MARIALEJANDRA QUEVEDO WONG Savannah College of Art and Design Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Ricardo Navarro, Professor of Interior Design/Graduate Coordinator

CAMI QUINTEROS (P. 100) University of Massachusetts Amherst Graduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Carey Clouse, Graduate Program Director Quinteros is a force when it comes to project visualizations, which reference the regrowth of bones, otherness, and human bias with their abstracted beauty.

FORREST RALL University at Buffalo Graduate Architecture

DAVID RICO-GOMEZ (P. 108) California College of the Arts Undergraduate Architecture

ERICK RUIVO New York Institute of Technology Undergraduate Architecture

NOMINATOR: Miguel Guitart, Assistant Professor

NOMINATOR: Antje Steinmuller, Associate Professor and Chair

NOMINATOR: Mike Nolan, Professor

Light wells and green infill are frequent themes in Rall’s portfolio, including his project Carved Illuminance, a stunningly daylit, green-roofed museum, designed with Raegen Lester.

Rico-Gomez employs intense research and an acute sensitivity to vernacular and ecological systems to create original and innovative buildings.

KATIE REGIS Ryerson University Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Joel Hunking, Studio Instructor A fine arts approach to physical models and sketches and a firm belief that Scandinavian design is a key to wellness distinguish Regis’s uplifting portfolio of white, daylit interiors.

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MONSERRAT RIOS-LUCIA Kansas State University Graduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Michelle Wempe, Professor of Practice Showcasing graphical fluency and a stylish boldness, Rios-Lucia creates ideas that are both radical and implementable.

Ruivo’s technical skill and attention to detail inform work that both engages with and heightens the senses.

DARIO SABIDUSSI (P. 96) University of Pennsylvania Graduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Andrew Saunders, Associate Professor, MArch Program Director Cinematic visuals and thought-provoking research underly Sabidussi’s exceptional portfolio.

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COURTESY FORREST RALL

Quevedo Wong’s portfolio is imbued with the idea that design can drive social change: Witness visualizations for concepts such as an inclusive, sustainable workplace for eyeglasses company Warby Parker.

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CONNY SALAZAR Woodbury University Undergraduate Architecture

HANNAH SMITH The University of Texas at Austin Graduate Interior Design

NOMINATOR: Aaron Gensler, Chair of Architecture

NOMINATOR: Igor Siddiqui, Associate Professor of Architecture and Interior Design/Interior Design Program Director Smith is a top student whose designs draw on a rare combination: artistic dexterity, a keen sensitivity to vernacular strategies, and a bold contemporary palette.

YANINA SANTOS Fashion Institute of Technology Undergraduate Interior Design

WEIZI SONG (P. 108) ArtCenter College of Design Undergraduate Architecture

NOMINATOR: Nicole Migeon, Adjunct Assistant Professor

NOMINATOR: Emil Mertzel, Professor

Santos’s well-researched, accessible work merges visual flair with sensitivity to site, culture, and the environment.

NICOLE SARMIENTO University at Buffalo Graduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Joyce Hwang, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies Sarmiento creates striking, socially relevant work with an excellent standard of technical research.

SAMANTHA SETOKUSUMO Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Challie Schafer, Professor of Interior Design Winner of multiple academic scholarships, Setokusumo implements stylish, smart strategies that respect client needs and are highly practicable.

Winner of a 2020 ArtCenter Denhart Family Sustainability Prize, Song is particularly effective at manipulating rammed earth, which he employs in endlessly artful ways, from textured facades to intricate tiles.

WESLEY STOLTZFUS Drexel University Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Rachel Simmons Schade, Associate Program Director, Architecture Stoltzfus combines a keen awareness of city, landscape, and sculptural form to create lively, relatable work.

ANDRIANI SUGIANTO California Baptist University Graduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Keelan Kaiser, Architecture Program Director and Professor Exceptional rendering abilities and astute reactions to context, culture, and client make Sugianto’s portfolio particularly strong.

LAUREN SHAUL University of Nebraska–Lincoln Undergraduate Interior Design

REBEKAH SUMMA Samford University Undergraduate Interior Design

NOMINATOR: Lindsey Bahe, Interior Design Program Director

NOMINATOR: Jeannie Krumdieck, Professor and Chair of the Department of Architecture and Interior Design

Shaul’s sophisticated, urbane designs are infused with natural materials, biophilic principles, and a keen sense of the natural world outside.

PEIK SHELTON (P. 100) University of Pennsylvania Graduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Andrew Saunders, Associate Professor, MArch Program Director Shelton’s seductive renderings and drawings merge with brave, truly original ideas—particularly where architecture meets the urban realm.

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Summa’s designs are deceptively deep, stemming from a highly personal and intuitive approach that results in fresh, simple, and very practicable work.

SHENG THAO University of Minnesota Undergraduate Interior Design

ERH-TE TSAI ArtCenter College of Design Undergraduate Interior Design

NOMINATOR: Shawn Gaither, Adjunct Instructor

NOMINATOR: David Mocarski, Department Chair, Graduate & Undergraduate Environmental Design

Thao’s visual skill and careful attention to culture, place, and detail make for comfortable, beautiful, and humancentered designs.

EVE TOBEY (P. 118) California College of the Arts Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Antje Steinmuller, Associate Professor and Chair Tobey’s avant-garde approach focuses on forging unusual relationships through architecture. Her Bridge of Nymphs encloses San Francisco’s Bay Bridge in a cicada farm, joining humans and insects in a symbiotic relationship for sustenance.

Artfully combining metal and stone, Tsai evokes a contemplative mood in a space for mourning and grieving as well as a gastronomical experience centered on Buddhist practices.

SYDNEY TUCKER Kansas State University Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Michael Dudek, Associate Professor Reflecting Tucker’s strong intellectual approach, her senior research project proposes a creative environment for children rooted in theories of cognitive development and psychoanalysis.

COURTESY ASIYE YUKSELEN

Salazar develops excellent interior and exterior visuals, and creates dynamic, civic-minded proposals that have compelling resonance, even when pushing the envelope of the possible.

GARFIELD LIBRARY PARK Asiye Yukselen, Illinois Institute of Technology

AUDREY TIRTA WIDJAJA Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Liset Arza Robinson, Professor of Interior Design Widjaja’s proposals for an assisted living center, a commercial office space, a primary-care clinic, and a music venue all have a strong narrative thread, with individual elements designed to tell stories.

KELLY WU WU British Columbia Institute of Technology Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Tiia Manson, Program Head, Bachelor of Interior Design With carefully detailed schemes for interiors, Wu is constantly on the hunt for new amenities and experiences that can help connect people with one another in order to build community.

YUXUAN XIONG (P. 96) University of Pennsylvania Graduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Andrew Saunders, Associate Professor, MArch Program Director Xiong’s provocative proposals—for a public bathhouse on a river, an apartment renovation, and a vertical cemetery—are rooted in their site and place, but seek to establish new building archetypes.

ALAYNE DEAUNDREY UMALI Savannah College of Art and Design Undergraduate Interior Design

PHUONG VU University at Buffalo Graduate Architecture

NOMINATOR: Liset Arza Robinson, Professor of Interior Design

NOMINATOR: Georg Rafailidis, Associate Professor

Umali says that art is her anchor, and this is reflected in her ongoing work for a wellness and vocational facility in the Philippines that layers socioeconomic research and sustainability strategies into a strong visual framework.

Vu seeks to give form to new cultural experiences. Bold formal moves, like enveloping a student center in landscaping, directly express the central ideas of the buildings.

KYLE VICE Georgia State University Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Hoa Vo, Assistant Professor, Interior Design With clearly defined material palettes and stark geometries, Vice’s spaces for a trade-show stand, a dental spa, and a wellness-centered apartment complex have a striking graphic quality.

SIMIAO (ARIES) WANG ArtCenter College of Design Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Melodie Yashar, Professional Instructor Wang identifies and leverages cuttingedge building systems for his projects, with an emphasis on sustainability. The After Earth project, which envisions how communities might survive as more of the earth turns to desert, is a good example of how he seeks to anticipate future needs.

MEIMEI YANG (P. 124) Ryerson University Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Jonathon Anderson, Associate Chair, Associate Professor, Director of Design + Technology Lab Yang’s work is informed by a strong interest in the visual arts, sustainability, and digital tools. She employs a wide range of visualization techniques to express the cultural and technological layers of her work.

SUYANG YAO California College of the Arts Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Amy Campos, Associate Professor and Chair of Interior Design Yao eschews conventional orthogonal spaces in her designs, turning instead to organic forms, cutouts, and surface manipulation to create delightful multisensory experiences.

ISIDORA STELLA YUBELIA Savannah College of Art and Design Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Liset Arza Robinson, Professor of Interior Design Yubelia’s projects include assisted living, workplace, hospitality, and community spaces, showcasing her versatility as a young interior designer.

ASIYE YUKSELEN Illinois Institute of Technology Undergraduate Architecture NOMINATOR: Peter Landon, Adjunct Professor at IIT, Founder and Principal at Landon Bone Baker Architects Two of Yukselen’s projects—a community center and a public library, both for Chicago’s South Side—demonstrate her skill at translating urban forces and community needs into building form.

XIYUE ZHANG California College of the Arts Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Amy Campos, Associate Professor and Chair of Interior Design Whether Zhang is designing a behavioral health clinic or a venue for a fashion event, she pays great attention to spatial elements that shape people’s experience of a space.

HAOTING YAO Indiana University Bloomington Undergraduate Interior Design NOMINATOR: Bryan D. Orthel, Associate Professor & Interior Design Area Coordinator Yao dives deep into the relevance and meaning of spiritual practices in contemporary society to inform the design of a temple that helps people process their grief at losing their loved ones.

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DESIGNING FOR DEATH With an eye to natural cycles of demise and rebirth, architecture students devise new forms for memorials and new rituals to accompany them.

Death is inevitable. Even so, very few people like to think about, talk about, or plan for it. Architecture students Dario Sabidussi and Yuxuan Xiong, both graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, are exceptions.

Amid the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic and ecological precarity, they have staked out wildly inventive rituals of remembrance and resilience through architecture.

For an advanced design studio course in the spring of 2021, Sabidussi and his partner Diego Ramirez challenged common but environmentally disastrous practices like embalming and cremation while designing new spaces of mourning in New York’s Central Park, their chosen site. But they had to address these concerns within the context of the studio’s theme: theater design.

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“A theater is supposed to be a space of vibrancy and life—you leave feeling full of life; you’re rejuvenated,” Sabidussi explains. “We wanted to give that same respect to the dead. So we created a theater of life and a theater of death, [to] create a new kind of funerary tradition.”

Every aspect of the team’s Seneca Growth Complex challenges business as usual in the death industry. Visitors remember their loved ones in the subterranean Theater of the Living, while researchers study ecological burial practices underfoot.

Sabidussi’s classmate Yuxuan Xiong also questioned traditional mourning rituals with Lightbringer, a belowground memorial between Hudson River piers 62 and 63. He and three classmates, Bolai Ren, Yiyi Luo, and Zhongming Fang, submitted a “reverse skyscraper” to the eVolo Skyscraper Competition

during the height of the pandemic.

They didn’t win, but their design did raise questions about ritual and remembrance in the context of COVID-19.

In Lightbringer, mourners descend from street level down a spiral walk into a deep atrium to send off loved ones or visit cremains, while workers operate the crematorium. The furnaces’ heat powers entangled strands of eye-grabbing optic fibers above, while river water churns through the structure, protecting it from floods.

“At the time, we were in a very hard situation where we couldn’t have large gatherings,” Xiong says. “So we thought it would be nice to have something that’s large and can be seen from different angles, something that helps you think about the sort of memories that you want to cherish. This memorial sculpture allows people to heal.” M

COURTESY YUXUAN XIONG

By Audrey Wachs

COURTESY DARIO SABIDUSSI

SENECA GROWTH COMPLEX Funeral innovations, such as biodegradable capsules that convert bodies into fertilizer for an arboretum, tie the architecture of the Seneca Growth Complex back to the death–life cycle.

Despite its otherworldly design, the students hit upon practical solutions like using EPS Geofoam to create a natural stone look underground without adding impossible stress to the labyrinthine structure.

LIGHTBRINGER During the cremation process, the building’s lighting element expands and contracts to create a visual reminder of the life cycle.

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DONGQI CHEN In dealing with the messiness of the built environment as it currently exists, Chen imagines a practical and optimistic future for architecture.

By Marianela D’Aprile

“Architecture lives on the connections to the preexisting contexts,” writes Dongqi Chen, a master of architecture student at the University of Pennsylvania. At a time when the state of new construction is dubious—relying on the demolition of existing buildings or the clearing of huge swaths of land, and presenting renderings that end up having little to do with built reality—Chen’s work imagines a way for buildings to engage their physical surroundings almost in real time.

An innovative reuse proposal for the Sunshine Cinema on Manhattan’s Lower 98

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East Side gives the building a second skin thick enough to house additional programming (a climbing wall, for example), but also creates new views deeper into the building and out into the neighborhood.

In an entirely different setting—a bucolic clearing in the middle of Mill River Park in Stamford, Connecticut—Chen has developed a design for a childcare center. Its blocky volumes reveal a purposeful responsiveness, finding possibilities for engagement in the places where two forms touch or appear to just miss each other.

For the University of Pennsylvania campus,

Chen’s design for the Penn Museum Archives Extension lifts the program off the ground, creating a jagged form perched above adjacent rooftops as if on stilts.

Chen’s work is simultaneously imaginative and deeply grounded in reality. Each design is accompanied by meticulously drafted wall sections, details, and plans chock-full of information about the building and its surroundings. These technical drawings reveal the wisdom in Chen’s work: In order for architecture to engage its context, architects have to properly understand that context first. M

COURTESY DONGQI CHEN

In a proposed extension to the Penn Museum Archives, Dongqi Chen, a graduate architecture student at the school, displays a geometric ingenuity and sensitivity to existing conditions.

Structurally supported by three main traffic cores—two sets of stairs and an elevator—the extension adds a new horizon to the museum’s roof while exposing its historic facade.

On a site in the Callowhill neighborhood of Philadelphia, Chen reimagines a former market as a combination public garden, animal crematorium, and biological research center. Called the Ark of Relief, it’s an interrogation of human– animal relationships. Curved ramps and pathways connect sunken gardens throughout the site, contrasting with the orthogonal layout of the existing neighborhood.

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HOPEFUL HOUSING Seven architecture students channel their personal experiences and lineages into the design of supportive and sustainable housing projects.

By Stephen Zacks

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COURTESY BROOK BOUGHTON

VALLÉE VERTICALE Brook Boughton’s residential high-rise proposal, Vallée Verticale, “investigates the dichotomy between the [residential] and public spheres” by incorporating amenities and public spaces throughout the tower rather than at street level. Each floor is characterized by an open atrium and lobby space, while circulation is organized through a series of tubes that dissect the entire building.

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attempting to replicate the force required to create them, and dissecting the marks through diagrammatic representations.

Subversive engagement with the digital as it interacts with human environments is a particularly salient theme throughout the portfolio of University of Massachusetts Amherst MArch student Cami Quinteros. They explore fluid dynamics, mass burial sites in Chile, codesign with computers, and migration patterns in Chiapas, Mexico, through computational line drawings that challenge the political neutrality often attributed to numerical processes.

Meanwhile, their use of color and organic forms (in psycho-geographic collages and a community housing concept for migrant workers in western Massachusetts) brings a seductive beauty.

Sanctuary Living shields undocumented workers from capture by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency by sheltering them in quasi-religious sanc-

tuaries that resemble personalized SANAA housing pods. Being encouraged by professor Pari Riahi to move away from the rectilinear was a moment of epiphany for Quinteros that propelled them into a search for form and meaning through native sources of knowledge.

“I was like, ‘Oh hell yeah, I can do that,’ ” Quinteros says. “Because my existence, as the existence of every other migrant in this country, means that we can change the form and the shape of everything around us. I’m from Peru. We have the Andes, and we’ve made all of these different steppes. There’s no reason this needs to be a cube.”

Materials, landscape, and systems thinking animate the design arguments of Elina Chen’s portfolio. For Mycelium as Connective Building Tissue, Chen addresses agricultural waste, worker housing, and industrial production of nontoxic insulation through her concept for a factory that makes insulating panels, sustainably

COURTESY ELINA CHEN

Among this year’s Future100 students, some express a certain interiority of personal experience through residential architectural forms. Ethical concerns pervade their portfolios. These projects are not technocratic solutions to general problems of housing and programs for institutional clients; rather, they are extensions of an inward search for meaning and a turn toward the particulars of things that matter on a social and existential level.

For example, when Syracuse University undergrad architecture student Kristabel Chung designs migrant domestic worker accommodations, reflecting on discriminatory labor laws in her mother’s native Hong Kong, her research process involves in-person interviews and quantitative surveys asking workers to evaluate and draw their own spaces. One of her projects performs a forensic study of the 23 holes, tears, and stains on a hoodie her mother wore while doing domestic chores,

LANEWAY HOUSING For Laneway Housing, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona students Noah Lemus and Kimberly Carlisle inserted a multifamily structure within a block of single-family homes behind a commercial strip in Toronto.

An extensive double-skin facade and other strategies insulate and power the building and conserve energy, while a complex program serves multiple generations and user groups.

COURTESY NOAH LEMUS AND KIMBERLY CARLISLE

STITCH & GLUE SHED Materials, landscape, and systems thinking animate the design arguments of Elina Chen’s portfolio. In her proposal for Stitch & Glue Shed, the student creates a plywood housing prototype that repurposes stitch-andglue kayak-building technology for Mahama Refugee Camp in Rwanda.

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COURTESY KRISTABEL CHUNG

houses workers, and protects the ecology of the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez valley.

The portfolio of Peik Shelton moves dramatically from incredibly nimble but somewhat mechanistic black-and-white drawings to photo-realistic color renderings. His adaptation of a socialist housing block for the 1980 Moscow Olympics into Intergenerational House makes some clever spatial gestures, carving out a central courtyard to encourage greater community and reorienting the apartment terraces in multiple directions to generate more dynamic views and experience.

Noah Lemus’s portfolio shows an aptitude for spatial thinking and the adaptation of leftover urban voids to create infill housing. In the case of Laneway Housing, Lemus and fellow student Kimberly Carlisle inserted a multifamily structure within a block of single-family homes and behind a commercial strip in Toronto. An extensive double-skin facade and other strategies insulate and power the building and conserve energy, while a complex program serves multiple generations and user groups.

Student work sometimes falls into a trap portrayed by a widely circulating meme that says something like “Society has collapsed and nothing is functioning anymore, but the typical studio assignment is still ‘design a mixed-use multifamily housing development.’ ” Brook Boughton’s portfolio investigates Sardinian terrain, industrial ruins, and the division between public and private in high-rise housing in Vallée Verticale, layering his drawings with overlapping uses and an interplay between human and natural environments. But one senses the limits of the assignment here: In the absence of larger policy measures, what is the meaning of another mixed-use multifamily project in Downtown Brooklyn?

Several of the portfolios include visual artwork begun before the students entered the university and continuing afterward. It indicates a desire to maintain connections to the qualities of personal expression, craft, and materiality that first drew them into architecture. This may be a hopeful and healthy impulse, given the rigors of coding requirements, office culture, and client service that can put a damper on the artist inside, and we hope it will be sustained as they make their way into the profession. M

FROM TOP: COURTESY PEIK SHELTON; COURTESY CAMI QUINTEROS

PEIK SHELTON Shelton’s early drawings have the feeling of precision of industrial machines, but as they progress into real-life projects, they become hyperrealistic and saturated with color. The Bank Barn imagines a traditional rural structure in Pennsylvania converted into a warm home for an empty nester, influenced by a project contemplated for his mother as well as a year spent working in the Peterson Rich Office before returning to school.

KRISTABEL CHUNG Chung’s portfolio (opposite) shows an equal commitment to her original motivations as a visual artist and a phenomenological connection to experience.

Her design for a housing development in Flatbush, Brooklyn, won first place in the NOMAS Student Housing Design Competition for its innovative blend of senior housing, affordable housing, and market-rate apartments.

CAMI QUINTEROS Sanctuary Living (right) merges housing pods for migrant workers with underground hideouts designated as sacred space that offer protection during immigrant raids by the government. Nestled in a tiered organic structure built with traditional rammedearth construction, the units draw from the vernacular of Quinteros’s native Peru.

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POLINA KULIKOVA The undergraduate architecture student explores the cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions of architecture through various visual media.

By Adrian Madlener

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shared facilities and a multipurpose cultural center. “My biggest pet peeve is how gate-kept the profession is both in theory and in practice,” she reflects. “Real estate developers care very little about the social or environmental impact of their work. They tend to use bad design to make more money and price people out.

Architecture should be for everyone.” M

When it comes to architecture and design, “I draw from my experience of the world as an artist, first and foremost,” Kulikova says. “Our built environments have the power to profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being.”

COURTESY POLINA KULIKOVA

Russian-born Polina Kulikova draws influence from the particularly eloquent delineations of heavyweight architects like Zaha Hadid, Paul Rudolph, and Louis Kahn. For her, standard drawings, plans, and elevations don’t always express the full range of movements and feelings that environments encapsulate. Trained in the fine arts from a young age, the University of Southern California undergraduate architecture student prefers hand drawings to modeling software. In conceiving organically layered housing complexes, geometrically clustered museums, and spinelike bridges, Kulikova draws from Russian Constructivism and Suprematism but, perhaps most importantly, from the civil engineer grandfather who helped raise her. She believes that architecture, art, and design are inextricably linked, especially when it comes to communicating emotions and memory, but also the sociopolitical currents that shape the built environment.

Her speculative projects are situated in her native Samara, Russia, and her adoptive Los Angeles. While Street Corner depicts the urban decay of the former, she developed Share the Jungle with the latter in mind. In this exploration, Kulikova delved deep into L.A.’s housing crisis and its lack of shared community facilities in underprivileged areas. Her co-living concept incorporates living pods with

Kulikova’s Share the Jungle proposal is a response to the overcrowding and overpopulation of Los Angeles. The co-living project incorporates individual living “pods” that can be configured in various arrangements for eating, sleeping, cooking, socializing, and storage.

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RADICAL SUSTAINABILITY In an era of ecological collapse, design students move beyond easy notions of “green building.”

By Timothy A. Schuler

Ranging from small, site-specific interventions to speculative visions of a future characterized by ecological collapse, the portfolios of today’s design students are redefining the concept of sustainability for an era of unraveling. The earth’s biosphere is experiencing unprecedented losses as worldwide climate change threatens to make entire regions uninhabitable in less than a generation. Emerging architects face a daunting question: How will they design for an unknown future?

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COURTESY DENICE GUILLERMO

PNEUMA Denice Guillermo, a graduate architecture student at the University at Buffalo, drew inspiration for the structure of this buoyant research center from the American featherfoil, a rare aquatic plant. Working in collaboration with classmate Hunter Perez, Guillermo designed a scheme to use air sacs inflated by the wind to provide tensile and compressive strength, formalizing the architecture’s relationship to the natural world.

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Against a global backdrop of profound environmental and social instability, this year’s Future100 cohort is moving past easy notions of “green building” to design responsive architecture that engages issues of history, environmental justice, and the politics of nature.

Denice Guillermo, a graduate architecture student at the University at Buffalo, developed Vario Vitae, a housing project that addresses both embodied carbon and social cohesion—an overlooked aspect of resilience. It provides for the unique and changing needs of New York’s health-care workers, who increasingly come from abroad with the promise of applying for citizenship. Through the use of partitions and movable walls, the building’s hyperflexible units can expand or contract to accommodate single occupants, cohabiting groups, or intergenerational families, extending the useful life span of the building and avoiding carbon emissions associated with renovation or demolition.

Elsewhere, Guillermo looks to the unique characteristics of the American featherfoil, a unique aquatic wildflower whose spongy stalks feature air-filled pockets, for inspiration for a floating research center.

Buoyancy is also at the root of Boston Architectural College architecture graduate Sophie Clapperton’s proposal for a climate-adapted Kashechewan, a remotely located Cree First Nations community in the far north of Ontario, Canada. Informed by direct engagement with community members and extensive research into the centuries of cultural and physical violence visited upon Canada’s First Nations people by the Canadian government, Clapperton’s scheme seeks to interrupt a traumatic cycle of major flood events followed by emergency evacuation through a system of canals, constructed wetlands, and flexible amphibious dwellings. Fixed in place with mooring posts, the so-called Flex Pods feature exterior wooden panels that can be raised to form bridges between the units, alleviating the social isolation that accompanies flood events.

Mass extinction has made clear that architects also must begin to design for the needs of the nonhuman. David RicoGomez, an architecture undergraduate at California College of the Arts, embraces this imperative in campGROUND(s), an undulating mega-landform designed to

serve as a new gateway to Alameda Creek in the East Bay. Constructed from offcuts and leftover dimensional lumber, the lattice structure provides gathering spaces for people as well as modules of burrowing owl habitat. Over time, the landform is colonized by pioneering plant species, blurring the line between building and landscape.

Bringing nature inside, Weizi Song, an architecture undergraduate at ArtCenter College of Design, draws on the unique characteristics of rammed-earth architecture for Grounded, a line of biodegradable tiles that expresses humans’ innate and “timeless connection to land.”

Inspired by traditional building methods in southern China, Song preserves rammed earth’s aesthetic and performance qualities while advancing the material for interior uses through the addition of polyvinyl acetate, a binder that is 100 percent biodegradable.

Embedded in these students’ work is a determined optimism, as they acknowledge that to engage a world in turmoil, architecture must prove itself capable of adapting to new and existential challenges. Otherwise, even climate-adaptive design will only perpetuate the injustices of the past. M

COURTESY SOPHIE CLAPPERTON

DRIFTWOOD Sophie Clapperton, a recent graduate of Boston Architectural College, undertook a thesis project to research flooding in the Kashechewan First Nations community, a band of Cree people living along the western coast of James Bay in Ontario, Canada. She ultimately proposed architectural solutions to live with fluctuating water levels.

The canal-side homes she designed (left) rest on buoyant foundations and are connected to public promenades via self-adjusting ramps.

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GROUNDED Developed by Weizi Song, an architecture undergraduate at ArtCenter College of Design, Grounded (left) is more than a simple material study. Inspired by traditional mud construction common around the world, Song developed and prototyped a line of tiles made from rammed earth, an economical and sustainable material; she also applied her product to several interior design schemes, exploring the material across multiple scales and typologies.

FROM TOP: COURTESY WEIZI SONG; COURTESY DAVID RICO-GOMEZ

CAMPGROUND(S) David Rico-Gomez proposes something unusual—architecture whose primary users are nonhuman. His artificial landforms (below) are to be built of scrap dimensional lumber and serve as habitat for endangered burrowing owls and other wildlife in the East Bay area along Alameda Creek. There’s an upside for humans as well: outdoor recreation in a formerly suburban neighborhood.

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MATEO MANTILLA Mantilla’s ecologically sensitive, people-oriented projects speak to how sustainable design can engage its public.

By Marianela D’Aprile

With a view toward expanding urban green space, Mantilla’s Urban Wilderness (left) envisions a layered ecosystem in New York City’s Hudson Yards. Inspired by the striations of a forest canopy, the proposal allows sunlight to permeate multiple levels, creating density without crowding.

Mateo Mantilla doesn’t shy away from complexity. In his work, problems created by climate change, sea-level rise, and dense city living become opportunities to imagine new ways of not just designing and building—but also living. For example, a design for an urban development in New York City’s Hudson Yards incorporates systems for rainwater and gray-water collection while interweaving plant life with pedestrian and bike paths. But the proposal’s most compelling component is a full-page diagram that imagines how visitors might use the space, including mundane questions they might ask, like 112

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“Where are the bathrooms?” and “Can I park on-site?”

While the development’s form—undulating towers intersected by amoeba-like floor plates, interwoven with plant life and covered by an indistinct off-white material— is attention-grabbing, it’s the human considerations that demonstrate Mantilla’s understanding of how people engage with the built environment: not as design, but as destination.

A similarly complex proposal for a floating cruise ship terminal in quickly sinking Venice—including a system of courtyard-shading inflating cells that

contract and expand depending on daylight conditions—also deeply engages its potential users, providing ample spaces for people to gather and play.

But while Mantilla seems to thrive where competing conditions meet, his work also has the capacity for formal subtlety. A proposal for a wellness retreat in Clearlake, California, inserts simple rectangular forms into a softly undulating topography, producing moments of pause and communion with nature, demonstrating Mantilla’s clear ability to read a site and, when necessary, keep things simple. M

COURTESY MATEO MANTILLA

A mixed-use tower in downtown Savannah, Georgia, The Branch (opposite) is envisioned as an infill structure atop a former parking lot.

A semitransparent latticework facade is meant to unify opposing concepts of heaviness and lightness, an idea inspired by the realization that the vacuum of the parking lot made nearby buildings seem heavier and more oppressive.

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FUTURE FEELING Students envision the next generation of building technology as a vehicle for social change.

By Matthew Marani

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COURTESY UMAR MAHMOOD

FRACTAL HOUSING Umar Mahmood’s Fractal Units project is a large-scale urban housing development that incorporates apartments, shelter units, soup kitchens, and public programs. According to Mahmood, “The project investigates [Mandelbrot] fractal geometry, which can act as a bridge between biological accidents and technical systems.”

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BOX WORLD School of Visual Arts undergraduate student Xinze Li’s Box World proposal serves as a contemporary hotel for formerly incarcerated adults. Designed to evoke freedom of movement, the hotel is filled with customizable, modular furniture that can be arranged both indoors and out.

COURTESY DANNY ORTEGA

NO NATION EMBASSY Danny Ortega’s No Nation Embassy proposal aims to honor the history of Seneca Village, a largely African-American community that was destroyed to create Manhattan’s Central Park in 1857. The student writes, “With the ideology of anti-empiricism, this remake of Seneca Village accepts all as citizens with equal rights,” and acts as a safe space for undocumented immigrants and refugees.

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COURTESY XINZE LI

The rapid ascent of computational technology and fabrication techniques continues apace, facilitating projects of ever-greater complexity and structural daring. But those feats of architecture and engineering remain limited by the fundamental constraints of economy and contracting know-how.

That’s where architecture schools come in; they have long served as incubators for new modes of building and habitation that address the many crises of our time. So perhaps it is no surprise that the students of this year’s Metropolis Future100 are grappling with such issues as the migrant crisis, equity, pandemic response, and the remediation of mass incarceration.

For University of Pennsylvania MArch student Danny Ortega, his portfolio titled In Between Realms demonstrates proposals as works of parafiction or what he describes as a “construction of reality through the hybridization of diverse media.” The

portfolio is self-admittedly a flight of imagination, but the proposals retain a comprehensive understanding of materials and how structural and facade systems come together. Take the No Nation Embassy, a proposed safe house “for people of all backgrounds, cultures, and faiths,” where Ortega deftly lays out through structural models, facade applications, and axonometric diagrams how myriad pieces, such as sculptural columns of steel, composite stone panels, and ETFE, come together.

That same attention to detail and systems proficiency is on display in the work of fellow UPenn student Umar Mahmood. His concept for public housing, The Fractal Units, blends apartments and shelter units with amenities and services for the unhoused. However, it is the proposal’s exploration of biochemical reactions as a form of tectonic and structural expression that sets it apart

from the pack. “On an urban scale the project acts as a hybrid tower and landform,” writes Mahmood. “It behaves both as a Megastructure due to its multiple towers and as a Megaform due to the landform around the urban corridor.”

For School of Visual Arts interior design undergraduate student Xinze Li, “challenging the current limits or standards of building technology is always laudable, especially for students.” To that end, her proposal Box World offers a refreshing take on post-carceral habitation that facilitates shared spaces through movable furniture and readily customizable rooms. The mobile pieces of furniture are largely crafted of wood and, owing to their solar-powered lights, also function to illuminate the proposal’s outdoor spaces.

The three student projects demonstrate vivid imagination and technical mastery, and portend more things to come. M MARCH/APRIL 2022

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EVE TOBEY This student’s imaginative projects reflect a commitment to meeting the San Francisco Bay Area’s unique challenges.

By Erin Langner

California College of the Arts architecture student Eve Tobey integrates a deep connection with place into her whimsical designs that confront some of the profession’s greatest challenges head-on. “I believe that the way people interact with architecture is very much based on the innate connections we have with nature and the world around us, even down to a cellular level,” she says. This ethos is clear in Tobey’s portfolio, much of which manifests in biophilic forms that reflect the diverse landscape and communities across her surroundings in San Francisco.

In one project, Threads of Exchange, a forestlike canopy composed of dendriform columns shelters the city’s historic Alemany Farmers’ Market. The structure incorporates curtains, light panels, and waterproof tarps—important elements in an age of increasingly unpredictable weather. Another, Mediatheque, tackles the gentrification of San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. This community 118

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hub is made of materials such as steel and glass that reference the area’s industrial past. On the ground floor, a museum preserves Dogpatch’s history, while the upper levels nod to the future with spaces for community members to foster new connections.

But perhaps her most ambitious—and most radical—undertaking is the Bridge of Nymphs, a speculative project in which Tobey and collaborators, including fellow Future100 awardee David Rico-Gomez, re-envisioned the iconic San Francisco– Oakland Bay Bridge as a cicada colony.

Aiming to reduce carbon emissions from livestock, the design includes a multilayer tubular structure that wraps around the bridge, creating an urban insect farm that could provide the city with a more sustainable protein source. Through such innovative and fearless designs, Tobey challenges us to consider how our existing landscapes can be reconfigured in new ways to address our most urgent problems. M

In an effort to develop new ways of using plastic-based waste, Tobey, along with a group of fellow students, mixed packing peanuts and other plastic foam aggregates, pigment, and resin in a mold and then milled the resulting solid.

COURTESY EVE TOBEY

The Grove is an installation project made of 17 towers fabricated from interwoven redwood strips; together they form a radial grid composed of rotated octagonal profiles. The project is intended as an on-campus shelter where students can rest, relax, or meet up with one another.

The Bridge of Nymphs is an inventive project that responds to population growth, food insecurity, and climate catastrophe by reimagining the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge as a massive cicada farm. In the scheme, insects burrow into a synthetic bark skin during their nymphal stage, emerging to be harvested by retractable nets when they metamorphose.

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BUILDING COMMUNITY Architecture and interior design students dream up new ways to bring people together.

By Rebecca Greenwald

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COURTESY CLAIRE MORAVITS

AKACHOCHIN Inspired by its namesake red paper lanterns, Akachochin is a design for a casual outdoor restaurant that creates a sense of interiority and safety while gathering during the COVID-19 pandemic. The size of each lantern reflects the capacity of the seating area beneath it, where guests enjoy sushi served via conveyor belt—an homage to Japan’s Kura Revolving Sushi Bar, and a COVID-safe delivery method.

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exhibition, the Portal opens up more opportunities for the students and the public to interact.”

For Kalavagunta and Mary Claire Moravits, an undergraduate interior design student at the University of Texas at Austin, materiality is a part of making visitors feel valued and welcome while creating a sense of calm and joy. Moravits’

Akachochin outdoor eating concept looks to Japan’s izakaya street food culture to create an environment that would feel both informal and special for guests of all ages. The concept uses light and dark Japanese pine for 20 outdoor seating islands and brings in a burst of color with 24 voluminous immersive red nylon lanterns. For the Shosh Center for Afghan

CHRYSALIS (Above) Venessa Davidenko’s proposal for a student center at California College of the Arts centers on an art gallery to display student work. The top-floor gallery, called the Portal, anchors the undergraduate center, a graduate center, and a student-led club facility, which all hang below, suspended by a mesh of cables that also serve as gallery walls.

SHOSH COMMUNITY CENTER With a title derived from the Pashto word for “porch,” the center aims to provide Afghan refugees with a comfortable entry into a new culture. The design, which makes use of traditional Afghani carved wood and a central courtyard, won Kalavagunta an IIDA award in 2021.

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FROM TOP: COURTESY VENESSA DAVIDENKO; COURTESY POOJA KALAVAGUNTA

This year’s Future100 students view design and community as inextricably linked. Informed by cultural and anthropological research and coursework on the impact design has on human behavior and psychology, they are proposing spaces that celebrate and redefine the ways the built environment can bring people together. “Communities grow stronger when given spaces they can engage with.

And that’s where design comes in—to create spaces that console and invite people to stay,” says Pooja Kalavagunta, a master’s-degree candidate in interior design at Drexel University.

In the Chrysalis Community Center

by Venessa Davidenko, an undergraduate architecture student at California College of the Arts, the designer uses the practice and display of creative work to encourage dialogue and gathering for the community of a college campus. Davidenko places a student art gallery, called the Portal, at the heart of the building, while deploying circulatory paths to connect other programming zones including a student-led club space and a collective outdoor space. “The goal is for students to fill the spaces with their work so that it can spark interactions, critique, and inspiration,” says Davidenko. “By strategically meshing the functions of flow and

Refugees, Kalavagunta integrates wood in canopies and latticed screens throughout the space, in an homage to Afghani wood-carving craft traditions, to create different open programmatic spaces.

The students’ designs also recognize that diverse communities have diverse needs. These students are designing with consideration of nuanced experi-

senses (with research in autism including interoception and body awareness as an additional sense) and organizing different forms of play across the scale of gross motor skills. Carleton says, “I’m asking myself how architecture can serve people and designing around not just what’s trendy but what communities actually need.” M

sensory transitions, and simple navigation. The goal, Carleton writes, was to design a space that “accommodates to the students’ needs, rather than forcing the students to accommodate to the building’s needs.”

COURTESY SOMBRE CARLETON AND MARYAM ALSHIRAWI

ABA AUTISM CENTER Sombre Carleton, along with Kent State classmate Maryam Alshirawi, designed the ABA Autism Center specifically for youngsters with autism. With their users’ unique set of needs in mind, the pair designed the space to optimize flexibility,

ences across race, gender, age, sexuality, and neurological as well as physical diversity. For the proposed ABA Autism Center, Sombre Carleton, an interior design undergraduate student at Kent State University, introduced a central Gross Motor room activity zone to build bonding and belonging between young people by designing around the six

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MEIMEI YANG This young interior designer employs the visual arts to imagine bespoke environments steeped in universal narratives.

Ryerson University undergrad Meimei Yang sees interior design as a way of bridging her background in fine arts with her desire to address today’s most pressing issues. She deftly implements drawing, painting, collage-making, and other mixed media in speculative projects that explore personal narrative, heritage preservation, and environmental impact.

Whether it be an artist’s studio—a typology near and dear to her heart—or a mixed-use hospitality experience, Yang formulates holistic propositions on the micro-level that ultimately address macro-scale challenges.

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workspace, for example, highlights its cultural significance by evaluating the sculptor’s creative process through his everyday rituals. Throughout her diverse portfolio, her interdisciplinary understanding of architectural, urban, industrial, lighting, motion, game-design, and advanced technologies also comes into play. “I like to think of interior design as psychology and architecture as sociology,” she explains. “[The former] is far more intimate.”

Narrative is central to Yang’s Lens of Beauty project, in which she pays homage to the rich yet rapidly disappearing arts community of Toronto’s Scarborough Bluffs neighborhood. In response to the

loss of creative spaces and cultural history in cities, she has proposed an artist’s residency that establishes a meaningful connection between a house and its natural surroundings.

The interior designer in training demonstrates her technical and problemsolving prowess in projects like Maison Margiela MM6, a theoretical store cleverly anchored in an unused shopping mall corridor. The modular scheme, composed of curved mirrors and integrated displays, makes better use of the overlooked space and facilitates a more engaging, personalized, and spontaneous shopping experience for unsuspecting passersby. M

COURTESY MEIMEI YANG

By Adrian Madlener

In a 2021 case study, Yang performed a spatial reconstruction of Isamu Noguchi’s Long Island, New York, studio and home using digital illustration based on archival photography (opposite). The project examines the sculptor’s life through a series of six everyday rituals.

Yang’s proposal for the Center for Social Innovation’s community space (this page, bottom) prioritizes equity and accessibility by considering universal design principles— from bathrooms to bike storage to drop-in day care.

Play to Power (A Generation) is a playground project (this page, top) that uses recycled materials and sustainable building technologies to engage children with topics such as renewable energy and the climate crisis through play.

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C O N G R AT U L AT I O N S TO THE

We're proud to support the future of design— the new professionals who will redefine and reimagine the practice of architecture and interior design.

Congratulations, what a huge accomplishment! As you enter the workforce, remember to be flexible and pivot when opportunities arise to maximize your future success.

WHITNEY WELCH | VICE PRESIDENT COMMERCIAL SALES | DALTILE CORPORATION

Formica Corporation congratulates the Metropolis Future 100! We celebrate your accomplishments and look forward to your continued impact on the design community.

AMY GATH | VICE PRESIDENT – MARKETING & STRATEGY | FORMICA CORPORATION

Interface congratulates the Metropolis Future 100! Your fresh ideas propel our industry forward. Together we can positively impact people and the planet.

ERIN MEEZAN | CHIEF SUSTAINABILITY OFFICER | INTERFACE

Keilhauer is so inspired by this year’s Future100 recipients, who are paving the way forward in our industry. Congratulations everyone!

MEGHAN SHERWIN | CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER | KEILHAUER

Sherwin-Williams is proud to support future interior designers as they continue to showcase the power of design through their work.

SUE WADDEN | DIRECTOR OF COLOR MARKETING | SHERWIN-WILLIAMS

We can’t wait to see what the future holds for this year’s Metropolis Future100!

In Partnership With

In Depth The interior design of Tamra Elementary School in Tamra, Israel, is filled with graphic elements and ornamentation inspired by embroidery patterns found on traditional Arab dresses as well as by the city’s skyline. The school was designed by Tel-Aviv firm Sarit Shani Hay.

© COURTESY CREDITS TAL GO HERE NISIM

Can design transform education? Not all by itself. But when architects and designers work closely with students, educators, and communities, they can shape spaces and experiences that radically enhance creativity, flexibility, collaboration, and sustainability. The following school projects—from small pre-K interiors to ambitious new universities—shake up stale models, tap into unique sites and cultures, and, perhaps most importantly, raise learners’ expectations of what is possible.

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for

COURTESY MICHELLE YOUNG

Creative Schools

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Creative Learning

NUBO Frost Collective and PAL Design Group, Australia NUBO sought to encourage children, parents, and caretakers to learn and play together through activities such as making art and cooking, and—perhaps most importantly—by exploring unique and varied spaces.

The space closed as a result of the pandemic.

For early learners, designers worldwide focus on play and place.

By Ian Volner

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S

ince time immemorial, schools for the youngest learners have typically been long on structure, short on stimulus.

As architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange wrote in her book The Design of Childhood, “In the one-room schoolhouse, there are two pieces of design: the room and the seat.”

For all the recent advances in the study of early-childhood development, most schools still rely on a similarly straitjacketed model, which Lange refers to as “one-directional education.”

But there’s encouraging news for the toddler set, particularly on the international front, where the pace of change has been remarkably brisk. In a competitive global marketplace, emerging economies and regional powerhouses alike are advancing learning spaces that can promote creativity and innovation—trying to get a leg up on the future. China, for example, has a new education law aimed at reducing the pressures of homework, tutoring, and over-testing on younger

students. Singapore and Korea have both developed standards to measure students’ “creative and inventive thinking.”

“Routine cognitive skills—skills that are easiest to teach and easiest to test— are also exactly the kind of skills that are easiest to digitize, automate, and outsource,” Andreas Schleicher, head of the Paris-based Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), told Arts Professional.

A sampling of recent projects from South Asia to Latin America shows how much attention is now being paid to design that supports creativity and exploration

among the smallest members of the global community. The keys are playfulness, engagement, and connection to place, encouraging young kids to make discoveries on their own—albeit with quite a bit of visual pizzazz.

In Seoul, South Korea, local firm OA-Lab debuted its Flower + Kindergarten: a mysterious, glowing hunk of a building pierced with irregular apertures. The school opens to reveal an interior of warm wood surfaces enlivened by colorful details and furnishings.

The whole scheme is designed to maximize interaction and activation:

FLOWER + KINDERGARTEN OA-Lab, Korea

COURTESY KYUNGSUB SHIN

Wood surfaces enlivened by colorful details and irregular niches and alcoves promote interaction and imagination.

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TAMRA ELEMENTARY SCHOOL Sarit Shani Hay, Israel

COURTESY TAL NISIM

This school in Tamra, a majority-Arab city in Israel, takes the form of a miniature village, with designs inspired by both traditional embroidery and the buildings and landscapes of Tamra itself.

Niches and alcoves abound, and the contoured cladding panels on the exterior can be used for planting an array of seasonal flora.

Half a world away, Brazilian firm Shieh Arquitetos has created the Ecoara Waldorf School outside São Paulo, a rammed-earth and hardwood structure composed of hexagonal classrooms that open both to a partially covered interior space and to a rambling landscape. The outdoors becomes a direct tool for play and discovery, notes firm partner Leo Shieh, while the fluid interior becomes a “sanctuary space,” and a center for interaction and community. “One thing we always try to do is kill the corridor,” says Shieh, whose company has worked on schools for all ages in Brazil. In doing so, play, imagination, and activity become intimately connected to the classroom itself. The low-tech school was even built partly by its community of parents and students, making it a textbook example of learning through doing—and through architecture.

The educational world’s gradual move away from bland, one-directional pedagogy also depends on a new relationship that is developing between these learning spaces and the social and

physical communities they’re being built for. “I think it’s essential to be aware of the culture that surrounds the school,” says Tel Aviv-based designer Sarit Shani Hay. “I try to create places that are accessible for all children,” says Hay, who sees her role as using design “as a tool for social change.” To that end, her designs tend to invite the outside world into the learning space—an approach exemplified by her office’s elementary school in Tamra, a majority-Arab city in Israel’s North District. Featuring motifs from traditional Arab art and architecture, such as a wall-length wooden rendering of a minaret-spiked skyline, the project includes multiple alcoves and benches, transforming the classroom into a familiar indoor village for fun and discovery. “It’s

about connecting children to their roots,” says Hay. “You have to consider context.”

This sort of educational urbanism— an attempt to weave together school and city and blur the lines between the playground, classroom, and neighborhood— has been cropping up in an array of locales, which speaks to its appeal and adaptability. For their library addition to the Sharda School in Kopargaon, India, architects Sameep Padora and Associates fashioned a brick roof that leaps over the reading room below, forming a continuous structure that doubles as a walkable viaduct for pedestrians. Locals can wander freely across the site, strengthening the bond between the community and the institution. “We wanted to create a seamless connection with the landscape,” MARCH/APRIL 2022

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SHARDA SCHOOL Sameep Padora and Associates, India

PLUG-IN LEARNING BOX People’s Architecture Office, China The low-cost modular system can be configured in endless variations.

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TOP TO BOTTOM: COURTESY EDMUND SUMNER (2); COURTESY PEOPLE’S ARCHITECTURE OFFICE (PAO)

The school’s curved brick roof—arching over an open reading room—connects to the community by doubling as a pathway for pedestrians.

ECOARA WALDORF SCHOOL Shieh Arquitetos, Brazil

LEFT TO RIGHT: COURTESY FERNANDO STANKUNS; COURTESY ECOARA WALDORF SCHOOL

Students and parents helped build the school’s rammed-earth structure, whose hexagonal classrooms connect both to the outdoors and to a semi-enclosed interior space.

Padora says. And while the project has largely succeeded in that regard, it has also had the unanticipated effect of making schoolchildren a part of the urban action. “They’ve been using the vault as a slide,” says Padora.

Including civic participation as a part of the learning experience is just one way that this holistic approach is blending educational and public spaces.

In Shenzhen, China, during the city’s 2019 architecture biennial, designers at Beijing firm People’s Architecture Office unveiled a project they call the Plug-In Learning Box. A modular system for school construction, it is intended to create a low-cost, quick-to-build education solution for China’s fast-growing cities. With a footprint that can be

easily reconfigured, the system can be inserted into the urban fabric to bring school to children rather than the other way around. The firm completed a modified version of the concept in 2020, also in Shenzhen.

One of the most charming, inventive projects in this emerging idiom also demonstrates its potential pitfalls as a community-centered early-education design. Technically speaking, NUBO is—or, rather, was—not a school at all.

Designed collaboratively by Australian firms Frost Collective and PAL Design Group, the commercial children’s center in Sydney afforded an open-ended, user-driven space for creative exploration and growth. Wandering through the two-floor, multi-room space, kids could

take up activities ranging from cooking to making art to just hanging out, all in an elegant ambience slightly reminiscent of a hip downtown café (albeit one with a big chrome slide in the middle of it). The referencee was no coincidence, as NUBO sought to include parents and caretakers, not as chaperones but as active users navigating the space alongside their young charges in a collective intergenerational experience. Unfortunately, NUBO proved too communal, shutting down permanently last November owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The same perils that confront the city are bound to confront educational urbanism, wherever or however it manifests.

And yet the case for a more embedded, outward-facing educational architecture in the United States is compelling, especially for those about to have their very first encounter with the sometimes scaryseeming world beyond the nursery walls.

“In this country, we still create schools the way we did 50 years ago,” says Ron Bogle, CEO of the National Design Alliance and team leader of Reimagine America’s Schools, a nonprofit that seeks to change the way education spaces get built. From his point of view, accelerating technological and social changes demand that we look beyond the one-directional brick box, to see schools instead as part of a larger urban whole where even the smallest children can feel at home. “You have to think of the school and the neighborhood as a single system,” he says. “Parks, services, affordable housing…if you surround them with that, you can make schools vital centers for renewal.” M MARCH/APRIL 2022

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Reshaping Education

by Reshaping Space DLR Group’s endlessly flexible Canyon High School in Arizona moves far beyond typical learning models.

COURTESY TOM REICH

By Karissa Rosenfield

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The need for systemic change in American public education is no secret; it’s a complicated matter. But what if that change could be expedited by architecture? That’s what DLR Group set out to do with Canyon View High School in Waddell, Arizona.

The architects worked closely with the Agua Fria Union High School District’s community—including officials, teachers, and parents—to help push beyond traditional models of teaching and create a flexible, community-focused high school that responds to student needs and fosters independent learning and interdisciplinary collaboration.

The campus’s varied steel and masonry buildings are connected by a linear outdoor spine—the Agora—that DLR calls a “Marketplace for Learning.” The passively cooled space provides several indoor-outdoor environments, including project rooms, event spaces, dining facilities, and an athletic training corridor.

At the heart of the Agora is the north-facing Accelerator, a multiuse creative and incubator space that can flex to meet

the needs of over 130 educational, theatrical, and public uses.

The school’s auditorium, “white box” theater, exhibition space, broadcast studio, makerspace, and outdoor “learning stair” are all connected by glass airplane hangar doors and outfitted with adjustable seating to provide an open canvas for activities.

To the north, a series of four interconnected “Academic Forts” open to the landscape. These naturally lit learning studios exhibit one of the project’s guiding principles: “spatial agility,” or the ability to accommodate different types of learning. Reminiscent of childhood forts, the malleable spaces inspire creativity with their brightly colored open rooms, which can be reconfigured into several shapes and sizes by repositioning glass partitions, drapes, sliding doors, and furniture. Depending on students’ momentary needs, they can become private learning spaces or large collaborative zones.

“Collective ownership of space … became critical in the design and function of spaces for the school,” says DLR Group’s

Varied buildings, connected by a linear spine called the Agora, provide flexible, indoor-outdoor learning environments and creative spaces. Solar canopies provide much of the school’s energy.

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The linear Agora (left) contains public event spaces, exterior project rooms, and an athletic training corridor, among other facilities.

The Agora’s heart, known as the Accelerator, hosts a variety of creative and incubator spaces (opposite, top), from broadcast facilities and makerspaces to theaters.

design lead Pam Loeffelman. “The building forms and functional adjacencies blur the boundaries between inside and outside, teaching and learning, public and private.”

Considering that the project is set within a harsh desert climate, where summer temperatures reach well above 100 degrees, thermal comfort is key. The school’s 102,835 square feet of outdoor space are passively cooled year-round to never exceed 85 degrees. Large photovoltaic canopies, which provide up to 20 percent of the school’s energy needs, shade the Agora. Open, airy spaces are equipped with low-velocity, high-volume fans to keep a constant, comfortable breeze, while building orientation maximizes daylighting and airflow. The north-facing Academic Forts have a steel frame and plaster exterior that opens to mountain views and provides the studios with natural light and glare-free learning spaces. The buildings on the south side of the linear campus are constructed with load-bearing masonry walls that minimize harsh exposures.

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(PCMs) were installed behind the walls and ceiling tiles of one classroom. Performance has been monitored by Canyon View Students along with ASU. Beyond the building itself, DLR Group highlights user health and experience as the most important aspects of designing a sustainable space. The design team created a system of metrics called VALUES (Viewing Architecture through the Lens of User Experience for Sustainability), which covers a range of topics from indoor air quality to community access and visual and thermal comfort. This knowledge is then shared with students as learning moments within the school’s curriculum to teach lessons about sustainability, architecture, physics, and more.

“Envisioning an education that blurs the edges between teaching and learning was the district’s starting point and our ‘north star,’ ” Loeffelman explains. “We focused on creating architecture that enables and connects, is flexible and adaptable, as well as cost-effective and easy to operate, establishing a high level of quality for the building systems that is both timeless and distinctively Arizona.” M

COURTESY TOM REICH

Open classroom spaces (opposite, bottom) can be reconfigured by repositioning partitions, drapes, doors, and furniture.

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COURTESY SETH POWERS

LET’S GET TOGETHER

Ge Hekai Hall at Wenzhou-Kean University unites students and disciplines.

By Jennifer Krichels

With its central location on campus, Ge Hekai opens to a 3.5-acre quadrangle (opposite), whose pathways are both diagonal and ellipseshaped. Students can access rooftop gardens via stairs (right) that ascend from ground level.

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I

t is no mistake that a dance troupe has taken over a balcony space inside Ge Hekai Hall, on the Wenzhou-Kean University campus in Wenzhou, China. The building, which houses the university’s architecture, design, and computer science programs, is made to be occupied by students from around campus.

Designed by Moore Ruble Yudell (MRY), Ge Hekai is anchored by an 800-seat central forum, which is “a kind of interior Piazza di Spagna” for the university, says John Ruble, design principal for the project and cofounder of MRY. The space features three stories of tiered seating overlooked by open balconies and an overhead bridge connecting the hall’s east and west wings. Within this community hub students can just as easily stage an impromptu dance rehearsal or shoot a video as they can take in a lecture by a world-famous economist.

The very history of the campus lends itself to understanding the power of cross-pollination among academic disciplines and cultures. The only public college in the United States to collaborate on a campus in China, New Jersey–based Kean University launched its Wenzhou location in 2011 in partnership with Wenzhou University, a public nonprofit Chinese institution. Two hallmarks of the agreement were that all students would have unfettered access to the internet, just as they do in the United States, and that graduates would receive dual degrees from Wenzhou and Kean.

The Wenzhou-Kean campus, a 175-acre site surrounded by mountains about an hour south of Shanghai, was created through a master plan by Michael Graves’s office that placed the university’s architecture and design schools (both named for Graves himself ) at its center. To its north, the hall dialogues with Perkins and Will’s Student Learning Center, a hybrid library and activity center slated for completion next year. To its south, Ge Hekai extends to an expansive 3.5-acre quadrangle, whose perimeter pathway forms a tilted ellipse crossed by intersecting diagonal paths leading to the hall’s east and west gardens.

The civic-scaled design earns its focal position on campus with several gestures meant to express China’s history, its forward-thinking goals, and the concept of international collaboration. While the 140

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The forum’s tiered seating is designed to be both flexible and approachable. The space’s height and drama help make it a central meeting place on campus.

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COURTESY SETH POWERS

COURTESY SETH POWERS

“BY THE TIME YOU PUT ALL THOSE THINGS TOGETHER, YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT THE FUTURE FABRIC OF SOCIETY.” — JOHN RUBLE

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hall presents a modern, formal portico as a grand gateway at its southern facade, it also uses the concept of a Chinese urban district to incorporate a series of alleyways, lofts, and bridges that become a sort of “three-dimensional mini campus” accessible to all students, says Ruble.

Eight oblong “bar” buildings, clad in Angola black granite, form the structure’s three-floor base, hosting community spaces and classrooms, flexible exhibition areas, a makerspace, a digital-media auditorium, and a lakeside café. Punched windows and deep inset ledges emphasize the three-foot thickness of the walls while also providing interior shading and hiding mechanicals and ductwork. The bars are connected by a network of exterior bridges that circumnavigate the building and act as structural braces, reducing steel in each of the wings by resisting torsional movement. Each bar has a landscaped rooftop that students can use around the clock, while the surrounding landscape extends the rooftop gardens to the ground, stitching the building into its context with 16-foothigh freestanding stone walls that form a series of outdoor rooms.

The bars are capped by two striking, daylit studio loft buildings, which form the fourth and fifth floors and offer more traditional architectural design studio spaces. These are fronted with ultra-highperformance concrete (UHPC) sunshades.

(The use of UHPC throughout the project allowed for a 12 percent reduction in overall steel structure.) Shading was also important for the hall’s central forum, whose atrium features a hexagonal skylight, and where the architects introduced a concept they call bo lang, meaning “wave.” White ceiling slats meander in angular directions, creating a play of light and texture above the grand space. Custom terrazzo flooring in parallelogram shapes throughout the hall also expresses these angles.

As the hall welcomes students from near and far, and (pandemic permitting) from different disciplines across campus, it is on its way to achieving its potential as a campus gathering place and an incubator for the future. “This is a place for architecture, urban and industrial design, and computer science; by the time you put all those things together, you’re talking about the future fabric of society,” says Ruble. M

A large portico (opposite, top) serves as the building’s grand entry. Black, bar-shaped buildings (opposite, bottom) form the hall’s base and host classrooms, community spaces, and more; two white studio loft buildings flank the forum. Angled slats and ceiling forms throughout create a play of light and texture.

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A Course Correction Niger-based architect Mariam Kamara has created a new Harvard Graduate School of Design studio that could profoundly change design pedagogy everywhere.

By Kelly Beamon 144

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COURTESY ROLEX/STEPHANE RODRIGUEZ DELAVEGA

In 2014, architect Mariam Kamara founded her award-winning firm, Atelier Masōmī. Her rapidly growing practice informs a series of lectures she has delivered recently at MIT, Columbia University GSAPP, the African Futures Institute in Ghana, and Harvard GSD.

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rchitect Mariam Kamara—founder of Niamey, Niger-based firm Atelier Masōmī— is a contrarian of design pedagogy as it is largely practiced today. To Kamara, modern is not synonymous with European forms, architecture is not only for Westerners to define, and the so-called canon of great buildings actually ignores most of the built world.

“There’s a perception that we—80 percent of the planet—are just receptacles for Europeans’ and Americans’ grand visions,” says Kamara, who in recent years has won several international honors, including two LaFargeHolcim Awards for her firm’s Hikma Community Complex (designed together with Studio Chahar) and a Prince Claus Award for outstanding achievements in the fields of culture and development. “This lopsided way” of studying architecture, she adds, must change.

A

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To help correct it, last fall she created a ten-student studio at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) called “Designing for the DNA of a Place,” to teach a groundbreaking process for visualizing architecture in places where you happen to be an outsider. The very existence of this course may signal a tidal shift, due partly to its Ivy League home and partly to Kamara’s rapidly expanding influence.

“We focus so much on the built result.

I wanted these students to focus on process, ethics, and the implications of our work,” she says.

To expose students to the inequities of the architectural canon, Kamara asked them to design speculative projects for a Boston-area site, informed by the region’s Indigenous influences. A key challenge, she points out, is that Indigenous precedents—which she describes as being part of North America’s DNA—are often missing or inaccessible because a colonial value system encourages students to ignore

them. Students spent weeks working through this kind of intense research, which Kamara uses in her own projects.

The assignment was meant to widen students’ references and teach avoidance of the usual models, which represent a singular colonial point of view.

Kamara contends that the reading list to support this new approach has yet to be written, but her curriculum does fit with a growing school of thought—and with direct calls to action—to decolonize architectural education and the archives that sustain it.

Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) professor, for example, took on the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for defining and canonizing Modern architecture to the exclusion of Black architects in “White by Design,” an essay she contributed to the 2019 volume Among Others: Blackness at MoMA by Charlotte Barat and Darby

COURTESY MAURICE ASCANI

Atelier Masōmī’s Dandaji Regional Market, completed in 2018

HER MAJOR INFLUENCES

FALKÉ BARMOU Award-winning Nigerien architect whose mosque in Dandaji, Niger, Kamara converted into a library in 2018

ELIZABETH GOLDEN As an associate professor at the University of Washington, Golden was Kamara’s thesis adviser and asked her to assist on the design of the Gohar Khatoon Girls’ School in Afghanistan. The two women cofounded United4design, a collective with architect Yasaman Esmaili and designer Philip Sträter.

DAVID ADJAYE As part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Initiative, Adjaye advised Kamara as she designed a new cultural center for the city of Niamey, Niger.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY PHILIP STRÄTER; COURTESY CREATIVE COMMONS; COURTESY ED REEVE; COURTESY CREATIVE COMMONS; COURTESY HOLCIM FOUNDATION; COURTESY CREATIVE COMMONS; COURTESY ASTRID ECKERT; COURTESY CREATIVE COMMONS

MARIAM KAMARA BALKRISHNA DOSHI The first Indian Pritzker Prize laureate, and looked to for his skill in adapting Western principles in ways that suit his home country.

ALERO OLYMPIO The African Futures Institute (AFI) chose Kamara in 2021 to deliver its Alero Olympio Memorial Lecture, named after the architect who left a legacy of Ghanaian buildings and sustainable practices after her death at age 46 in 2005.

FRANCIS KÉRÉ The 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate and winner of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture is an evangelist for local materials and an innovator of his own earth building technique, which inspired Kamara’s use of compressed earth blocks (CEB).

LOUIS KAHN “He tried to do more of a translation of local traditions than an imposition of Western architecture,” Kamara says.

CHARLES CORREA The late Indian architect and urban planner adapted Modernist tenets to complement Indian topography and building styles, the way Kamara aspires to.

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SUBJECTIVE TIMELINES To illustrate what she calls the lopsidedness of current architectural pedagogy, Kamara presented two worldviews in the timelines below during a 2021 MIT talk titled “How We Narrate Our Yesterday Determines How We Imagine the Future of Architecture.”

(Source: Destiny Disrupted, by Tamim Ansary)

ISLAMIC WORLD CHRONOLOGY 4000 BCE Ancient Times: Mesopotamia and Persia

EUROCENTRIC CHRONOLOGY

2500 BCE Birth of civilization (Egypt and Mesopotamia) approx. 479 BCE Classical age (Greece and Rome)

610 Birth of Islam 620s to 660s The Khalifate: Quest for Universal Unity 660s to 1250s Fragmentation: Age of the Sultanates 1095 to approx. 1291 Catastrophe: Crusaders and Mongols 1290s to approx. 1600 Rebirth: Empire and expansion approx. 1420 The Rebirth: Renaissance and Reformation approx. 1685 The Enlightenment

1800s The Reform Movements

approx. 1890 to 1950 Triumph of the Secular Modernists approx. 1957 The Islamist reaction

1760s The Revolutions (Democratic, Industrial, Technological) approx. 1843 Rise of Nation-States: The Struggle for Empire 1914 to 1945 World Wars I and II 1946 to 1991 The Cold War Currently The Triumph of Democratic Capitalism

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FROM TOP TO BOTTOM: COURTESY MAURICE ASCANI; COURTESY JAMES WANG (2)

approx. 1420 to 1700 Permeation of East by West

COURTESY TORSTEN SEIDEL

English. “Modern architecture builds the world for the white subject, maintaining the logics of racism while also imagining a future world in which nonwhite subjects remain exploitable and marginal,” Wilson wrote in that essay. “The power of the architecture and its archive is to produce ‘whiteness’ by design.” MoMA’s architecture and design department finally acquired its first work by a Black designer (Charles Harrison) in 2016.

Likewise, Neal Shasore, head of school and chief executive officer for the London School of Architecture, has spoken out in favor of decolonizing the study of architecture. The editor of the Parisian magazine The Funambulist, Léopold Lambert, recently said, “No other discipline is better at implementing settler colonialism.” And a group of faculty and students at Keele University in the U.K. published an 11-point “Manifesto for Decolonising the Curriculum” in 2018.

Kamara says the idea to offer her critique in the form of a studio at one of

the world’s most prestigious training grounds for architects came to her gradually, like her own professional growth.

Memories of her childhood spent partly in the Sahara, an hour’s drive from a 15thcentury town distinguished by the indelible profile of its earthen adobe architecture, served as an antidote to her own feelings of alienation when she realized how little teaching time was being devoted to the history of places other than Europe.

“Studying in the U.S., I was constantly being asked to unlearn what I knew to be true,” says Kamara, who earned her MArch in 2013 from the University of Washington College of Built Environments.

After graduating, she launched her firm in 2014. Her stint as David Adjaye’s mentee in the 2018-2019 Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative provided additional exposure. A recent announcement that she is part of a team handling high-profile commissions for Liverpool’s Canning Dock that includes Adjaye, U.K. architect Asif Khan, and American artist

Niamey 2000 (this page),

by United4design, a collective that includes Kamara, adds density to the city without disturbing the area’s cultural fabric.

It is built chiefly of locally made, unfired earth bricks to avoid using imported concrete and steel.

Atelier Masōmī’s Hikma Community Complex was two projects in one: adapting an existing mosque to serve as a new library (opposite, top) and building a larger mosque (opposite, center and bottom) to accommodate the growing community.

Compressed earth blocks used for the new building suited Dandaji’s DNA better than concrete, which Kamara says has been over-sourced.

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Theaster Gates has expanded her business. She expects her staff, which has grown from four people to 12 in the past year, to double again. Meanwhile, she plans to open a new office in New York to handle furniture design, competitions, and other work. Projects on the boards include sites in Senegal, Liberia, Ghana, and the Middle East. “We’re in a lot of invited competitions, which was not the case before,” she says.

Increasingly working outside her comfort zone of Niger prompted Kamara to query what kind of design might be appropriate and ethical for an outsider to propose. “What is my place here?” she asks. America is a perfect place to start teaching that process because it’s the “perfect colonial project,” she says.

Kamara’s new scholarship is also on tour: She has embarked on a series of lectures hosted by MIT, Columbia University GSAPP, the African Futures Institute in Ghana, and Harvard GSD, each time addressing glaring omissions in things like the foundational timeline of milestones in ancient Africa versus Europe.

“That [view] dismisses the rest of the world as faraway places that have only sometimes provided us with beautiful but primitive structures, while Western buildings are the ones worthy of true regard,” Kamara says. “Suddenly, we can’t imagine designing without concrete, wood, glass, or steel. Yet these are far from being universally used around the world.”

There are few better ways to indoctrinate the new generation of architects than to inject this critical mindset into the curriculum of an Ivy League university that serves as a main artery of the profession, infusing it with newly minted practitioners from all over the globe.

“This was one of the few courses they were offering that centered on the idea of architecture playing a role in deep social issues that are happening today,” says one of Kamara’s students, Kathlyn Kao. “It talked about this unique research methodology, which I hadn’t encountered before,” says another GSD student, Thomas Kuei, recalling why he decided to register for the class. “We had to stay aware that the data we looked at wasn’t depicting the actual history of a space. . . because it was written by non-native people. We’d read multiple accounts of the same history to make our own [conclusions] about what an accurate history could be.” M 150

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ALL IMAGES COURTESY KATHLYN KAO/THOMAS KUEI

Harvard GSD teaching assistants Thomas Kuei and Kathlyn Kao were one of five teams in Kamara’s studio to develop speculative projects for a site in Boston—now home to an immigrant community—with an earlier Indigenous history.

The team’s drawings (this page and opposite) address the immigrant and Indigenous cultures in form, material, program, and more.

KATHLYN KAO MArch candidate at Harvard University Graduate School of Design

THOMAS KUEI MArch candidate at Harvard University Graduate School of Design

“I’m doing my thesis about migrants from the Philippines, where my family is from, and I’m hesitant about American architects doing work abroad. Why the Philippines looks like an American suburb is concerning for me.”

“It’s been super exciting learning to unlearn the way that I’ve been taught…. Just talking to people of a location doesn’t mean you know the location. Talking to local people doesn’t mean you’re getting the full story. You’re only getting a snapshot from when those people entered the scene on that specific location.”

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NOTEWORTHY Katie Swenson

My house has a name given to it by its former inhabitant Katharine Lee Bates, Wellesley professor and author of “America the Beautiful,” in reverence to a giant beetle that spends its days cultivating and transporting a ball of animal dung, on which it feeds and lays eggs. The scarab, sacred to ancient Egyptians, is a symbol of rejuvenation and reincarnation. This seemed fitting when I moved into the Scarab in 2007, newly divorced, heartbroken, and raising three young daughters. This house would become the setting for our next chapter, a place that would influence our stories and shape who we would become—as great architecture has the power to do.

My daughters have grown up and spread their wings, journeying through love, loss, and 160

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all that life brings. This year, I gifted them a scarab amulet designed by Ron Anderson and David Rees as part of the show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room. The amulets were handcrafted in New York City, where I live most of the time now, and made of hand-painted recycled glass powder beads from Ghana. They carry with them the spirit of the Scarab.

Katie Swenson is a senior principal of MASS Design Group, an international nonprofit architectural firm whose mission is to research, build, and advocate architecture that promotes justice and human dignity. Katie is the coauthor of Growing Urban Habitats: Seeking a New Housing Development Model and author of Design with Love: At Home in America, and In Bohemia: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Kindness, a story set in the Scarab.

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COURTESY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

On the Scarab

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