Cultivating Care: Bryony Roberts on Public Spaces of Belonging and Connection
Photo by Andy Vernon-Jones.
By Julia Gamolina
Bryony Roberts leads the design and research practice Bryony Roberts Studio and is a founding member of WIP Collaborative. Roberts approaches design as a social practice, working with community groups and advocates to respond to the lived experiences and cultural histories of a place. Integrating methods from art, architecture, and historic preservation, Roberts creates immersive environments that transform public spaces and historical sites around the world.
Bryony Roberts Studio has been awarded the Architectural League Prize and New Practices New York from the AIA, as well as support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the American Academy in Rome, where she was a Rome Prize Fellow from 2015-16. Roberts guest-edited the volume “Log 48: Expanding Modes of Practice” and edited the book “Tabula Plena: Forms of Urban Preservation.” Roberts earned her BA from Yale University and her MArch from Princeton School of Architecture. She teaches architecture at Columbia University GSAPP. In her interview, Bryony talks about cultivating a new type of practice, advising those just starting their careers to learn how to make a case for the work that they do.
JG: Tell me about your foundational years — where did you grow up and what did you like to do as a kid?
BR: I grew up in Los Angeles and I was always drawing, crafting, or reading. I was an only child, so to entertain myself I often came up with elaborate projects — like making tiny furniture, curtains, decorations, and Fimo food for my dollhouse, which supported the intricate storylines of the characters living there. I definitely lived in my own imaginary world. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to be, but I was leaning towards either artist or investigative journalist.
A young visitor to the High Museum playing on "Outside the Lines," a project that activated the outdoor plaza with a maze of sensory environments. Project by Bryony Roberts Studio. Photo by Jonathan Hillyer.
"Outside the Lines" with the High Museum in the background. The project emerged from conversations with self-advocates with disabilities and their allies throughout Atlanta, with the goal of creating a space that celebrates a range of sensory experiences. Project by Bryony Roberts Studio. Photo by Jonathan Hillyer.
Me too! Our childhoods are very similar. What did you learn about yourself in studying architecture?
I went to architecture school four years after I finished my undergraduate education. During that time in between, I was practicing as an artist, writing art reviews, and supporting myself working as a copyeditor for magazines. I’d eventually started making site-specific installations and was interested in learning from the discourses and creative practices of architecture and urbanism.
Being in architecture school was a mind-altering experience in many ways. I was lucky to be at the Princeton School of Architecture with amazing faculty in both design, history, and theory. I learned how processes of making could be intertwined with critical work, which is something that I’m continually exploring today. I was also lucky to study with a number of truly brilliant women — Lucia Allais, Sarah Whiting, Sylvia Lavin, Liz Diller – who modeled different paths for creative and intellectual work in architecture.
How did you get your start in the profession?
I actually started just before I went to architecture school. I was lucky to have a friend from high school who worked at WORKac while the practice was preparing their entry for the P.S.1 competition. She was just leaving the office and they needed someone to step in and help with collages for the competition.
Fortunately, Photoshop was the one software I could use, so I did some collages that Dan Wood and Amale Andraos liked and they asked me to stay on after they won the competition. I learned CAD and Rhino from my generous colleagues in the office and worked on the P.S.1 project and some other competitions before heading to grad school.
“The importance of lived experience is a topic that intersectional feminist, queer, antiracist, and disability justice advocates have been addressing for decades, and my work is very indebted to those lineages.”
Tell me how Bryony Roberts Studio came about, and your personal evolution with it over the years.
Early in my career, I realized that I was searching for a mode of practice that I couldn’t find yet — a way of working between art and architecture, theory and practice, and research and advocacy. There are many expanded practices today, but in the early 2010s, I felt like I needed to create that path for myself. I began teaching full-time and pursuing projects on my own. I had a Wortham Teaching Fellowship at Rice University, which offered a supportive environment where I could explore research, pedagogy, and self-initiated projects. For the first five or so years, I had a more ‘academic’ practice focusing on research, exhibitions, and ephemeral projects, and for the last five years, I’ve had the opportunity to do larger-scale design and engagement projects in the public realm. It took me several years to gain clarity on the goals of the practice and to find the right community and support system for the work.
Now I feel a clearer sense of purpose across the research and design work. My practice focuses on the social and political dimensions of the built environment, specifically how the immediate scales of sensory, embodied, lived experiences are entangled with the larger scales of systemic inequities. I develop partnerships with community organizations to understand the lived experiences of the individuals in them. We think together about how new design interventions can celebrate existing histories and introduce new sensory and social experiences. The importance of lived experience is a topic that intersectional feminist, queer, antiracist, and disability justice advocates have been addressing for decades, and my work is very indebted to those lineages.
A visitor naps on one of the oversized cushions in "Softy," a site-specific project commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Big Umbrella Festival, which centers young audiences with autism and other developmental disabilities. Project by Bryony Roberts Studio. Photo by Michael Vahrenwald.
What have you been exploring most recently?
In the last few years, I’ve also been able to explore more the possibilities of collaborative feminist modes of practices. I’m one of the founding members of WIP Collaborative, a shared feminist practice of seven independent designers, and I’ve been teaching advanced studios on intersectional feminist themes at Columbia GSAPP. In the last six months, this work has expanded even more after the Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturned Roe v. Wade. I’ve been collaborating with Lori Brown at Syracuse University, Lindsay Harkema at City College New York, and Sadie Imae and Natalya Dikhanov of FLUFFFF Studio to teach parallel studios on reproductive justice. We organized a lecture series of educators, designers, and providers working on reproductive justice and we’ll be compiling the student work into a traveling exhibition opening later this year to raise awareness of the devastating consequences of this decision.
That’s amazing. Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
Well, like many people who run their own practice and are also adjunct professors, there are recurring challenges of economic precarity and work-life imbalance. That’s a significant systemic problem in this country with the way creative and intellectual labor is or is not rewarded. I don’t have any magic solutions or great coping mechanisms for those problems, but I’ve found really meaningful solidarity and support through collaborative groups like WIP Collaborative and through being in community with other folks in similar situations.
“Don’t let other people’s need for categorization stop you from doing work that you care about. Learn how to make a case for the work you do and explain why it matters. If you keep doing that, you can start to make space for yourself in the field.”
What are you most excited about right now?
I’m really excited about an unfolding, collaborative project that I’m working on with Abriannah Aiken, a recent grad from GSAPP. We’re developing a visual mapping project and an online platform to amplify feminist spatial practices and build community among feminist practitioners around the world.
The first phase is a visual diagram commissioned by e-flux that celebrates the wide range of contemporary feminist spatial practices and points to specific ways in which feminist practices are rethinking the built environment. Feminism is often considered just an issue of representation – a numbers game of adding more women, nonbinary, or trans folks to faculty, boards, or offices. Instead, we’re exploring how feminist spatial practices introduce expanded ways of knowing and making that enable more just and equitable futures.
The diagram is celebrating practices in six realms: Experimental Pedagogies, Expanded Histories, Embodied Theories, Collaborative Practices, Spaces for Non-Conforming Bodies, and Alternative Materialities. The next phase is a participatory, open-source online resource that will go much further to identify practices around the world, visualize connections between them, and offer a medium for community-building and exchange.
Who are you admiring now and why?
I’m really inspired by the surge of collective practices in the New York area, and beyond, working on social justice in the built environment. There was a roundtable at the Architectural League recently with people from Blackspace Urbanist Collective, Dark Matter University, Assemble, citygroup, Collective for Community Culture and Environment, Design Advocates, FUNdaMENTAL, and WIP Collaborative, and it was really powerful to hear from other practices about how they cultivate care in both their internal organization and their relationships to contexts and communities. It was inspiring to hear from the folks in Blackspace how they are carrying forward principles from the Combahee River Collective and values of Black Feminism at all scales of their organization, from their mission to the way that administrative labor is compensated.
People gather around "Soft Civic" at the City Hall in Columbus, Indiana, for the event "We the People," discussing democracy and leadership today. Project by Bryony Roberts Studio. Photo by Hadley Fruits.
A view from inside City Hall in Columbus, Indiana, looking out at "Soft Civic" during the event "We the People." Project by Bryony Roberts Studio. Photo by Hadley Fruits.
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
I believe that process is important. My hope is that the built environment can become more inclusive and open-ended, and that public spaces can offer more expansive versions of belonging and connection. For that to happen, I believe design practices have to change how they interact with people, both internal to the practice and outside of it. Architects are not taught people skills – we’re taught ‘hard’ skills rather than ‘soft’ skills – but it’s the ‘soft’ skills that the field really needs now. I’ve been developing processes of learning from people in my own practice, by developing experimental forms of collaboration with self-advocates and community groups and testing out a fusion of social practice and design.
I’ve also been on a mission to celebrate other designers exploring expanded modes of practice, as in the issue of Log 48: Expanding Modes of Practice and in Public by Design the next iteration of Exhibit Columbus for which I’m a Curatorial Partner. I keep working to elevate the work done by feminist and collective practices that show how new processes can yield exciting and equitable futures. I hope that the fields of the built environment can begin to value the embodied knowledge and intangible cultural histories that people bring to a space, and center open-ended, non-exploitative ways of learning from them. If I can help move the needle in that direction, and elevate people doing amazing work in the process, then I’ll be very happy.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
I often have conversations with young people who aren’t excited about a typical career in architecture and are searching for something more interdisciplinary and activist. Working outside of existing categories of practice is difficult — if people can’t quite understand what you do, it’s harder to secure opportunities such as teaching, funding, exhibitions, and awards. But there is also enormous creative and intellectual possibility in doing work that defies existing categories.
So, for folks interested in exploring that liminal space, I say — it’s difficult to sit with the feeling of not fitting in, but if you can learn to tolerate that discomfort then it can take you to really meaningful places. Don’t let other people’s need for categorization stop you from doing work that you care about. Learn how to make a case for the work you do and explain why it matters. If you keep doing that, you can start to make space for yourself in the field. Find other people who care about similar things and build community – share knowledge and encourage each other. Find mentors who can help you see paths towards your goals and help you get there. If you don’t have any yet, keep looking, and take advantage of wonderful organizations like Office Hours that offer mentorship. Alessandro Petti and Marie-Louise Richards say it beautifully: “We are interested in an artistic and architectural practice that does not claim a specific disciplinary territory but instead claims the right to exist in its own specificity against all classification.”