Making Collections: Jennifer Bonner on Big Experiments and Liberating Opportunities

By Amy Stone

Born in Alabama, Jennifer Bonner founded MALL, a creative practice for art and architecture, in 2009. MALL stands for Mass Architectural Loopty Loops or Maximum Arches with Limited Liability—an acronym with built-in flexibility. By engaging “ordinary architecture” such as gable roofs and everyday materials, Jennifer playfully reimagines architecture in her field.

Jennifer Bonner is also an Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Architecture II Program at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She has been a recipient of the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, Emerging Voices Award (AIA/Young Architects Forum), Progressive Architecture (P/A) Award and Next Progressives (Architect Magazine). She is the author of A Guide to the Dirty South: Atlanta and a recent guest editor for ART PAPERS . In her interview with Amy Stone, Jennifer talks about straddling academia and an experimental practice, advising those just starting their careers to get comfortable with and to have fun in the process of making architecture.

AS: How did your interest in architecture first develop?

JB: One of the formative moments I think back on is when my sister and I would go to work with my father on Saturdays in the mid-80s, when we were around six or eight years old. He worked for a software company in Madison, Alabama called Intergraph, and one of their products was a CAD system. He had this really large screen and workstation in his office, which kind of looked like a current day keyboard but just massive at three feet by six feet. We would use this little crosshair mouse and go over and pick out circle or square for our house drawings.

I guess it was weird to draw with CAD at such a young age. I’m Gen-X, and grew up on video games - not exactly the same as millennial screen culture, but I was definitely in front of a screen very early. That moment made an impression on me.

Jennifer Bonner (6 months pregnant); Domestic Hats Yard Art No. 6; Photograph: Caitlin Peterson

Cedar Pavilion (photo shows work in progress); Photograph: Tim Hursley. Work was completed as an Auburn University Thesis Project at the Rural Studio. Design Team: Jennifer Bonner, Mary Beth Maness, Nathan Orrison, Anthony Tindill

You went to Auburn, worked for three years, and then studied at the GSD. What did you learn about yourself while you were studying architecture?

I got really lucky at Auburn. There was an incredible program by Samuel Mockbee called the Rural Studio, a design-build program located in rural west Alabama, which gave me the opportunity to build something straight away both as a second year and also as a thesis student. I built my thesis project, the Cedar Pavilion. So at the age of 22, I had already built.

After graduating, I wanted to escape the rural south, and since London was the first big city I had ever been to for a study abroad trip, I was committed to returning for my first job in the profession. I moved there and worked for Foster and Partners and David Chipperfield for three-and-a-half years. After some time working for both Foster and Chipperfield, I realized that I understood how they made architecture - I started to question how “Jennifer” might make architecture. I thought graduate school would be a good place to figure out those questions, and that’s how I ended up back in the US at the GSD.

Do you feel like GSD gave you the push in the field that you were looking for?

I do - this may be obvious, but the GSD was a totally different educational experience than Auburn. Graduate school is full of criticality, deeper thinking, and allows the opportunity to build an intellectual project for oneself.

What did you do when you graduated?

In 2009, just as I was finishing the post-professional program, the recession hit. There were no jobs anywhere. My original plan was to work for somebody else again before starting my own firm, but there was literally no opportunity to do so. I applied to a hundred jobs in New York and got nothing.

As a way of survival, I started teaching and began my own practice. Now I’m ten years in. I didn’t think I would teach so soon, but that is how it shook out because of that defining economic situation.

“After some time working for both Foster and Chipperfield, I realized that I understood how they made architecture - I started to question how “Jennifer” might make architecture.”

Through those ten years, what have been your major milestones?

One major milestone was when I developed the body of work Domestic Hats in 2014. I studied various roof typologies - counting, sorting, and collecting fifty roofs in the city of Atlanta. Later this obsessive collection became an exhibition on Atlanta’s West Side in a 10,000 sf gallery, where I was award the Young Architect Forum’s Emerging Voices Award. That show pushed me to consider how representation might be a way-in to architecture.

After digitally creating sixteen massing models, we scaled them up to this very awkward, large size, but didn’t add any further details. They retained the aesthetic of massing models, but puffed up and constructed out of white EPS foam. After the exhibition was over, we took the models back out into the city and dropped them off as yard art in the front yards of the original houses we had sampled. Photographer Caitlin Peterson took these beautiful images of model and house with her large format camera.

That’s incredible. What other collections and experiments have informed your work?

After Domestic Hats, I spent a lot of time writing, lecturing, and thinking further about the potential for a roof as a generator for a domestic interior. Eventually, I realized that part of my recipe for work at MALL is to make collections of architecture, several objects at once, as a crucial step in the design process.

I start with a question, propel that thinking into research, double-down on representation, usually within the confines of a gallery, and finally, pursue a real built project. Haus Gables is an example of how one of the Domestic Hats massing models was eventually built at the 1:1 scale. In general, another milestone was to tackle materiality - experimenting with cross laminated timber and a mass timber superstructure that combines engineering with architecture. It was all one big experiment from foam to timber dollhouse!

Another body of work, Best Sandwiches, is a collection of architectural ideas around the notion found in popular culture that everyone is vying for the best sandwich, “the best BLT”, “the best philly cheesesteak”, hamburger, or whatever. You name the city, and everyone is looking for the best. I looked at this phenomenon in sandwiches and applied it to architecture, asking questions such as, “How does architecture stack?”and, “Can we build a mid-rise office tower out of BLT?” At the Pinkcomma Gallery in Boston – I exhibited a collection of grilled cheese and BLT models and elevations which filled the gallery as a serious, but pop idea for architecture. These concepts and projects have overarching conceptual agendas in which I’m pushing a big claim in architecture, such as the roof plans in Haus Gables or the alternating layers of “bacon, lettuce and tomato” found in Office Stack, a midrise office tower.

Domestic Hats; Photograph: Patrick Heagney

Best Sandwiches; Photograph: Adam DeTour

Jennifer Bonner (Faculty Editor) with Patrick Herron (student editor) arranging Harvard GSD, Platform: Still Life; Photograph: Anita Kan

Tell me a little about your writing and how that has folded into MALL.

Both of these things inform MALL’s projects. The dean of Harvard GSD invites a faculty member each year to collect and curate work of the school in an annual publication, Platform. It’s a massive project. As a previous faculty editor, I overlaid a thematic idea, “Still Life”, in order to compose and arrange student work that didn’t seemingly go together through sixteen still life arrangements. I can see compositional still lives in my own work after that project.

I’ve also edited a special issue of ART PAPERS on architecture and design, and commissioned writers, artists, critics, and different people to talk about the work of Los Angeles. Part of my agenda was to publish women, and I commissioned 38 women in total for that issue. It was the year we all thought Hillary was going to be elected and there was this Pantsuit Nation electric feeling in the air. Writing, editing, and curating is very important to my teaching and to my practice of architecture.

You also taught at Georgia Tech, Woodbury, and now the GSD. Tell me more about that.

When I began teaching at the GSD, my daughter was 7 months old. I had already taught for 6 years, three years at Georgia Tech and three at Woodbury, while also developing the practice. Now in my 5th year of teaching at the GSD, I often say teaching at the GSD for four years is really like 8 dog years [laughs]. The intensity of the place just adds on years.

How has motherhood played in to this, especially with having a very intense job during the intense early years of motherhood?

Yes - raising a toddler while building the house in Atlanta and teaching - it’s a lot of juggling. It was extremely difficult. I have a very great partner who is also doing a lot, so I think we somehow juggle everything together and it works.

“...part of my recipe for work at MALL is to make collections of architecture, several objects at once, as a crucial step in the design process.”

What have been your biggest challenges so far?

It felt very difficult for me, having built by the age of twenty-two, to go years and years without building. It took me ten years in practice on my own - trying to learn how to teach, find clients, and make work – in order to construct my first building. That process and time has taken too long. It’s been difficult to acquire clients. No one has come to me saying, “I would love a roof project with an innovative material like CLT,” and asked me to test out an experimental idea. No one is calling me for this kind of architecture.

Fed up with waiting, my husband and I figured out how to self-fund the Haus Gables project in order to make it happen. But it took time, a very long time, for us to slowly get to that point. What might begin as an overwhelming challenge, with hardcore persistence, can become an incredibly liberating opportunity. This is the story of building my first piece of architecture

What else have been the biggest highlights?

Building Haus Gables, I have to underscore, is the highlight. I’m still on a high from finishing it a year ago. After all of the struggle, I really do feel quite fortunate to have one foot in academia and one foot in practice. Time is on my side. Projects are slow and I’m really developing them in a particular way. It’s not the demands of a traditional office. It is luxurious to dive deeper into those ideas and work on them longer, which is exciting.

I’ve also really enjoyed lecturing about the work post-completion. I’ve given approximately 25 lectures in 20 months. My husband says, “You have to go on the road. You have to go and show this project to students across the country, no matter what’s happening with our family at home.” It’s been really enjoyable to share the knowledge. And I always say “yes” when asked to travel to give a lecture. I feel like it’s my duty as a female designer to talk about my work.

It’s also given closure to the project to talk about the concept, design process, and the material investigation, publicly in a variety of schools of architecture across the country. The feedback and commentary on the work is invaluable; I learn from the intellectual questions that emerge from the academic audience.

Who are you admiring right now and why?

My contemporaries. There are a few people that I look at their work and think, “This is weird. This is avant garde. This is exciting stuff!” One person that comes to mind is a friend, Laurel Broughton of WELCOME PROJECTS who is located in Los Angeles. Her work is advancing a conversation about scale in architecture. With a background in comparative literature, Laurel makes us think about form and objects differently. From her lo-fi GIFS and handbag line to a recent renovation and her teaching pedagogy, it’s imaginative.

Another person named Laida Aguirre of Stock-a-Studio has this amazing project around image-making and uses off-the-shelf materials and catalogs as a kind of primer for their work. They produce things that makes you think, “Is that architecture?” Yes! Hell yes, it’s architecture!

What is the impact you’d like to have in or on the world? What is your core mission?

I guess you could say the core mission is to make collections of architecture, where I’m pushing a very specific architectural agenda, to work on them in the gallery or in an abstract way in order to eventually spin them into real buildings.

A lot of people question what my practice will look like in ten years. I’ve always thought really early on in my career that I’d like to do six really good buildings. That is part of the mission, to not do everything, but to do six things really well - quality over quantity.

“Creativity doesn’t fit neatly between the hours of 9am-5pm. Projects do not get constructed in the year that you want them to. You have to put your head down and consistently work through all of the struggles.”

It’s refreshing to hear how you’d prefer more control over the project and the process so it’s more intellectually rigorous. Like you said, “I’m not looking to do it all, but to do it well.”

What do you wish you knew when starting out that you know now? What would you go back and tell yourself?

Creativity doesn’t fit neatly between the hours of 9am-5pm. Projects do not get constructed in the year that you want them to. You have to put your head down and consistently work through all of the struggles. You have to produce a lot of work until you arrive at a “Eureka” moment, and then you have to push through and struggle again with new material. It is a cyclical process that happens.

Yes! And you figure it out as you go.

For example, as a student at the Rural Studio, we had this pressure to come up with an inventive material to use, because there were lots of projects already completed by previous students out of imaginative materials such as recycled tires, carpet tiles, hay bales, car windows, etc. Turned out that our primary material was cedar wood, which isn’t at all that interesting, but I remember we placed this pressure on ourselves to find “the thing”- the story for our project. In the end, we built a pavilion. It was a basic structure that needed a roof and a deck—that’s about it. This kind of conceptual wrestling is absolutely necessary. Looking back now, I think there is some falling back to see this interest in inventiveness in the design process from my time at the Rural Studio and, yeah, you figure the shit out as you go!

What advice do you have for those who are just starting their career?

Architecture appears to be very heavy, serious, and draining, in terms of hours. Ultimately you have to get comfortable with yourself in that process which includes having fun. If you are not having fun in your work then it might not be in the right spot. I believe you can be rigorous and fun at the same time. It’s important to interject fun into the work or else it feels tired and straightforward.