Co-founded by Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann, After Architecture is a practice named to convey the built environment’s impact on cultures and ecologies. It employs tactics of intentional misuse to free materials and construction techniques from historical and disciplinary tropes. With a focus on public space, the Knoxville, Tennessee, based practice has completed projects in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Vermont, Washington D.C., California, and Europe. The firm’s work has been honoured with accolades such as an AIA Los Angeles Next LA Honor Award and a Society of American Registered Architects National Design Honor Award.
Q > What’s the most satisfying part of the creative/design process?
KM > We started our practice as a vehicle for design as conversation—a back and forth between two people on an equal footing. Some of the best moments in our practice are when we see that dialogue play out.
KS > In one of our first competitions, we were designing a low cost winter cabin. I spent a long time developing a tight plan around a centralised fireplace, but the building wasn’t complete until Katie drew the facade as a screen for storing logs. It was a small move, but suddenly the whole project came together as a narrative that mediates the cabin’s relationship between the surrounding forest and the interior hearth.
Q > Tell us about an experiment or gamble that turned out to be either disastrous or successful.
KM > We began working together in 2012 in our penultimate year of college, eager to see where design could take us beyond the context of the classroom. At that point, After Architecture was a creative partnership taking on the design of just about anything. During our final year of college, we completed our first couple of built projects — the Lightwave sculpture at the Cornell Botanic Gardens was funded by a university grant program and the Twofold bench at Design Museum Boston was awarded funding through a design competition. Once these were built and published, we began attracting larger commissions that required contracts and formal business structures, and we adapted on the fly. We were naïve about what practicing entailed, but our combination of youth and drive allowed us to overcome hurdles quickly. Our early work was prescient and set the stage for our practice today — deeply invested in material culture and engaging with the public.
KS > One of the strengths of our business model has been casting a wider net than traditional design practices. As a slow profession that still preferences years of experience, and in which awards for “young” architects commonly honour those in their 40s or 50s, architecture deems youth a limitation. Since founding our practice, we both have gone back to graduate school and studied under leaders in the business of architecture, like Paul Nakazawa at Harvard and Bob Hillier at Princeton. Nakazawa’s insights inform the way we think about overlaps between practice and research, while Hillier — who once brought an acting coach into the classroom — shapes the way we engage both clients and the public in conversations around design.
Q > What rule do you break most often?
KM > There are many design firms we greatly admire that have developed and refined a very cohesive style. We favour a consistent mode of working, which results in a body of work that alludes to a single style.
KS > From a branding perspective, this is risky, since clients have a harder time pinning down the aesthetics of our work, but our approach aims for designs that are materially rich, user-driven, and ecologically sensitive.
Q > The hardest thing you’ve ever done?
KM > In some ways, the beginning of our firm was the most difficult — after graduating from undergrad, we each had demanding day jobs across the country from one another (Kyle in New York and me in Los Angeles). When the work day was over, we would rush online to work together on competitions and eventually, our first major commission for two permanent installations in San Diego.
Q > What makes you angry?
KM > We find the distancing of high design from environmental good frustrating and counterproductive — we advocate for both in our work. For a brief window, sustainability was trending, giving rise to LEED certification-fever and prominently placed solar panel arrays, but like most fads, it faded. Unfortunately, climate change has not.
KS > Sustainable design has to be a core value. The current environmental crisis puts new strains on architecture as overextended supply chains threaten the production of conventional materials. In our work, we challenge the standardised building materials that emerged during modernism and are interested in how technological agency can help us reconcile the intentions of the designer with the irregularity of natural materials. This approach allows us to use abundant, rapidly-renewable materials in new ways by embracing traditional limitations like material irregularity.
Q > In what period or location have you learnt the most?
KS > Katie and I met and began working together while studying in the Bachelor of Architecture program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Those five years were the most intensive and tiring we had ever experienced, but also the most exciting. The relative seclusion of upstate New York produced a kind of monastic focus which has been hard to replicate elsewhere. Being in the trenches of design school with our classmates gave way to frequent, long conversations about how design shapes the world around us. The sense of community and idealism encapsulated by that time is very dear to us. We are also continuously impressed by the range of directions and successes of our classmates and faculty, who continue to be important sounding boards and influences in our work.
KM > This fall, we have had the opportunity to bring our material research into the academic studio through a fellowship at the University of Tennessee. The programme’s setting in Knoxville is in some way a microcosm of the United States — it is home to the Tennessee Valley Authority, whose massive infrastructural projects modernised the region; such infrastructure attracted the Manhattan Project to the area and led to the founding of Oak Ridge National Laboratory; the nation’s most visited national park, the Great Smokey Mountains, is a short jaunt away; and American kitsch runs deep in the local tourist sprawl of Dolly Parton’s Dollywood. During our time here, we have examined how invasive plant species, which thrive in Tennessee’s temperate climate, might be used in architectural applications. Such material abundance offers both environmental benefits as well as a departure from standardised materials — in effect, opening up new formal potentials.
Q > Which things would you like to include more in your life, and what would you like to include less of?
KM > I love architecture, but not when it operates in a vacuum. In that way, I would like to spend more time outside of the discipline — more performances, gallery talks, book readings; more scientific journals, technology hackathons, and nature walks; more entrepreneurial workshops, community meetings, and cooking classes.
KS > Our best ideas often emerge in other settings. We can appreciate different approaches to the world, while the subconscious runs steadily in the background, finding connections between architecture and everything else. Recently, we have gotten deep into material research, collaborating with scientists, preservationists, and others. There is a lot happening in other disciplines around the development of sustainable materials, but our challenge is to find ways that these materials can scale for architectural applications.
Q > How can architecture help to tackle inequality and other social ills?
KM > Public space shapes the daily lives of communities, signalling safety or danger, community or isolation, democracy or authoritarianism. The way that public space is designed, maintained, and legislated determines property values, health and crime, and cultural expression. For these reasons, we have dedicated our practice to acting in public space. Sometimes, our work is light and atmospheric; at other times, we use the venue of public space to reveal and acknowledge more challenging truths.
KS > Recently, we completed the Camp Barker Memorial in Washington, D.C., marking a site where formerly enslaved persons took shelter during the Civil War and shedding light on America’s history of oppression rather than celebrating valour in battle. A series of entry gateways to a public park, the memorial is not a destination but a threshold — a part of the urban fabric that can be walked through, touched, and inhabited. It reminds us of our fraught past as a country and acknowledges how far we have come while not shying away from the challenges we still face today.