How Do We Rethink Practice and Academia?
Over an inspirational virtual call, we talked to Anda and Jenny French, Principals of French 2D on their hybrid models of practice and academia. Their work ranges from housing and mixed-use projects to civic installations and exhibitions. French 2D recently received the 2020 P/A Award from Architect Magazine and was named a 2019 Architectural Record Magazine Design Vanguard winner. Anda currently serves as the Director-at-Large on the board for the Boston Society of Architects where she organized the Now Practice Now Series and works on the BSA’s EDI efforts. Jenny is an Assistant Professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and is also the Coordinating Faculty in Architecture for the GSD Discovery Program. As active members in the field and academia, Jenny and Anda have pushed the boundaries on the traditional models of practice and education. Read about how they are changing the narrative here.
How did you get to where you are, founders of French 2D?
French 2D - Anda & Jenny French.
Jenny French (JF): It’s funny, even when we were kids, we had a collaborative small office , working on projects together. Anda studied architecture as an undergrad in the Barnard/Columbia program and I went to college thinking that I would avoid architecture by becoming a physicist or an artist. While I was an undergraduate my sister was in graduate school, and so through visits and conversations I was able to glean what a Master’s in Architecture education looked like. I was intrigued enough to apply to architecture school instead of MFA programs, favoring the problem solving, rigor, and structure found in an architecture studio. I then headed to the GSD while Anda taught at the Syracuse School of Architecture. We began working on projects together, which accumulated as small ideas until 2014 when we were able to open a full-time practice together in the same place. What is interesting is that our parents are both architects, but in some ways, we wanted a somewhat different model of practice than they had, with more connection to academia. We knew we were interested in art, in experimental work, and the speculative aspects of architecture just as much as seeing a building through to completion. That is the balance we are trying to achieve in our work now.
Anda French (AF): I would say that the two of us reluctantly call ourselves architects. We love architecture, but we both kept trying different paths, and we kept coming back to architecture.
JF: We’re not interested in the very narrow, parochial, or traditional idea of what you have to be. We like the broader, umbrella definition of architecture as many things that fall under this discipline.
What are some challenges you faced in building your own practice?
AF: Building is the key word there. It has taken us until this point – 6 years of being full time in the same place, same office for us to realize that we don’t want to actually grow our practice. We’re not interested in having substantial staff. We have summer interns, and we have been able to parse out things to others. All the things we can outsource, we outsource because we really aren’t interested in a practice where we have to keep finding work to continue to feed the practice. For us, building our practice is about finding ways in which we can do the work ourselves. How big is too big of a project for essentially the two of us to take on? How small can we go to make it a successful prototype like our Place/Setting project. Right now, we are working on a building that is 160 units - it’s mixed use with a boutique hotel, and it’s the first time we are going to say we are not doing the Construction Documents. I would say that’s our biggest challenge – inventing a practice that can still exist in the architecture realm as a legitimate architecture practice without the kind of structured model it typically entails.
JF: The challenge is overcoming or accepting the viable version of our practice – one that is very small, which frankly, is how we can support ourselves. So, to stay in business means we embrace the model that we have. That might mean we are a little bit slower to expand or get to a certain level that others who have 10 or 20 employees can get to.
AF: We feel great about that. It has taken both of us to this point to feel that that’s ok and we don’t have to prove something. A lot of people try to give us advice, and it’s great that it works for them - that’s not what we want. So, that’s the challenge we’ve had to overcome, the sort of self-realization part.
Are there any policy changes in architecture that you wish you could change?
JF: The competition model in Europe is better – where paid competitions are able to champion exposure for young firms. It doesn’t seem to be a working model in the U.S. The channels through which work is obtained could obviously improve. It’s perhaps ironic that as a women owned firm, we have been faltering in finishing our WBE certification process, which feels quite cumbersome. It becomes one of those things that we haven’t yet done and therefore haven’t been tapping into opportunities that it affords. It’s a wonderful program, but it’s an example of another hurdle.
AF: It’s a burden of proof on the person who is already at a disadvantage. I would also say at more general, perhaps not policy scale, but equally important, the model that Jenny has set up for studios is the same model we like our practice to run with. It counteracts an architecture school model that produces the hero culture that rewards a certain way of presenting your work with a confidence and personality that can often lead to the wrong design pursuits later in one’s own practice - going after the big image and not thinking about the reality of how people and society work. Sometimes it’s hard at the final review to not pour too much praise on the project that looks great but embodies a dubious social commentary. I think that Jenny is good at running studios that counteract those tendencies in the field. The hope is that it starts to produce people who like to practice differently and are interested in a different kind of focus.
JF: A difficult tension for us is that we obviously care so much about drawings, form, and expression of ideas through form, but there is a lingering narrative that social responsibility and the production of critical and accomplished artifacts are mutually exclusive. The ideal is to have both. Anda is right that we are rewarding the current culture of image only and that content and policy gets a back seat.
What are some of the steps you’ve taken in studio to reframe the way you interact with the students?
JF: The studio is prescriptive with a narrow set of very open-ended questions so that everyone is encouraged to take a unique stance and follow their own interests within that. Right now, I’m teaching a studio about collective housing in Jamaica Plain in 2050, so students predict a near future, which is open ended.
AF: I also think Jenny does a good job of not making things so open-ended that students go off, procrastinate, and then are rewarded at a final review when they’ve hastily produced enough stuff. She sets up a process to allow students to infill how they are going to talk about the social, urban, and economic relationships while they are building the form, so they feel supported by that. The process allows them to reasonably take on those pieces of the puzzle.
JF: The reference to Mad Libs is a useful one for us; there’s a structure where individuality comes out and there’s a commonality within the structure. There’s no bad idea. Anything is a viable starting point if it can be unpacked and attacked from several angles.
What are the advantages / disadvantages of being women in the field, both in academia and/or practice?
AF: It’s hard because I feel like my answer to that has changed within the last 10 years. When I started at Princeton it was only 25% women. They kept having this conversation the numbers. The administration kept saying, “We only get 25% women as applicants; we don’t know why. Sorry!” We had to talk about it. “Do you think there’s something about this school when other schools have 50% women applicants; why do you think we are only getting 25%?” This began to change while I was a student and it was good to see.
At one point, the disadvantage was always being in the marginalized group because of sheer numbers. I feel differently now in that there is finally a sense that women are there for each other in architecture. If I’m being honest, I didn’t feel that way 15 years ago when I was in grad school. I had really wonderful mentors, but I also encountered other women who were 15-20 years older, who felt that because they had a hard time coming up through the system, they had no problem making your life just as hard. Some of those same women seem to have now realized that that was part of the toxic problem. Now, there’s a shift - we are talking about how it worked, how didn’t it work, and how can we actually work through this together.
JF: Culturally, the narrative has shifted and acknowledging that these hurdles exist and addressing underlying issues is necessary. The tough, super achiever female role model presented a persona that could feel impossible to mirror or achieve. I am happy to say that this is no longer the only mode in which women in architecture are operating. The negative side of that is that we of course see that tough personal armor gets you certain places; and that being
vulnerable and accessible can be misread as weakness. It’s a double-edged sword – to portray yourself as human.
AF: It still exists as a sub narrative in most cultures. If we walk in, smile too much, and are too accessible, we must not be important. That’s the feeling we sometimes get.
What are some of the challenges that emerging professionals or students face?
AF: I think one interesting challenge that the field is presenting to young designers is the fact that the profession is going in two different directions. You are getting larger corporate firms or very particular boutique, smaller specialization firms. That middle ground where people could start somewhere, take up different roles, and experience different parts of architecture - those are vanishing more and more. Those practices are often closing with their principals retiring or passing away. There isn’t the kind of culture that there was perhaps 50 years ago, when one could come up through an office and learn everything there was to know . It’s hard because Jenny and I only were able to build up our own practice so quickly and figure things out because we grew up watching how these different parts of practice work and we specifically went and worked for different scales of firms doing totally different things so we could gather that knowledge. If you are graduating from school and decide that that’s what you want to do - work for two years at different firms - the problem is that you potentially could end up getting even more marginalized. You are always doing the same thing and you’re not evolving your skillset. You’re always asked to do the thing you’re now good at, and you’re not invited as an asset to the firm to work on other things.
JF: If you are working in smaller firms then at least by osmosis you are potentially seeing all roles, getting a chance to become integral, and seeing how a business runs. I also see the appeal of working in a big corporate firm because of their security, dependability, and structure – I understand why people want that. Deciding what kind of practice you want to work in comes down to your taste or tolerance for autonomy, risk vs security, and predictability of income, for example. We don’t say this to be flippant about those things because we have outside funding, which we don’t. But, it’s obvious that there is an invisible privilege for those who aren’t concerned with paying their student loans and get to exist in more experimental, less stable firms.
AF: If I were giving advice to a young architect, it would be to infiltrate a larger corporate firm. If you feel uncomfortable with the small practice model financially but like other aspects, think about how you can become the person who goes through the ranks and changes a corporate culture and its
set ways of working. That seems to be where the real power is and that’s a different kind of risk.
Any final tips to leaders?
AF: A tip to leaders in their capacity as professional association members is to start listening to the ways in which the profession has to change and to not be passive but active agents of that change. Leaders have gotten to where they are generally without needing to question the context around their own path. They have to recognize that along the way they were most likely participating in a set of systems that weren’t equitable and probably had some values that were questionable because of the way our practice interfaces with issues in the world. If we could bring them to the table without their feeling like people are condemning them, but are instead asking of them to lead on these issues - that’s what we’re hoping to do. Anyone in power who hears ‘change’ hears criticism first, and that’s the hardest way to get anyone to evolve. When I talk to people about issues with equity in architecture, I ask them to think about their own experiences and think about how things might have been different. That seems to help because it’s personal to them.
JF: A critical thing is to find ways to advocate to broader audiences than just other architects. The housing market is one place where that exists. There’s a movement called Nightingale Housing in Australia, initiated and led by architects. They create supportive housing, cooperative housing, low income housing and there is an idea that it can be something that architects are instigating. We are all selling ourselves short on who can have control over capital. There are ways we can link up with alternative funding sources, grassroot funding sources that can have a societal impact. That’s an example to be followed, not yet seen in the U.S.
AF: It reminds me of every housing conversation we’ve been invited to and the number of people who absolve themselves and say, “Well, we are not the ones with the money. We can’t control what someone wants to build.” It’s really hard because you know that half of that is true. We are a fee for service profession but I do think there are moments when people are inspired to push their client, question things, and actually participate in more of the front-end work. It’s not an easy ask - to ask everyone to be an activist in a project. And yet, I would love to ask them.