Soft Infrastructures: KVA Matx’s Sheila Kennedy on Architectural Imagination and Caring for the Planet

By Julia Gamolina

Sheila Kennedy is an American architect, innovator, and educator. She is a Professor of Architecture at MIT and a founding Principal of KVA Matx. Sheila’s research and built work seeks to question and advance the material culture of architecture, to decarbonize the built environment and open pathways towards the decolonialization of building materials. Her work in practice at KVA Matx focuses on public sector, housing for people and plants, and projects for leading university programs in research and the humanities.

Sheila received the Innovator Award from Architectural Record, the Berkeley Rupp Prize for Distinguished Practitioners, the Innovation Green Grant from the Lemulson Foundation, and a Bose Innovation Fellowship, an award that is open to all faculty from across MIT. In her conversation with Julia Gamolina, Sheila discuses material circularity, the intersection of technology with the forces of nature, and the power of the architectural imagination.

JG: Your work in education and in practice at KVA Matx has focused on the use of renewable materials in architecture and the design of resilient ‘soft’ infrastructure. What is your number one priority in this realm for 2024? What should we all be paying attention to the most?

SK: As an architect and educator, I am focused on how to accelerate a transformation of the material culture of architecture that has been ‘inherited’ from modern industrialization. Architecture is a fundamental and creative medium that engages time, inhabitation, and materiality. As a discipline, architecture is well positioned as a field in which significant change can and should be explored and made. We need to move away from the energy expenditures and cascade of global harms that come from the extraction and wasteful use and disposal of virgin building materials in buildings and cities.

I see this as a creative, technical, and cultural project. It requires the architectural imagination, the use of technical tools and skills, and the creation of new storis, of compelling narratives that can create community and bring people together around shared larger ideas and actions. Response to the climate crisis is not a technical problem to be solved. Fundamentally it involves a creative and cultural shift in ways of societal thinking and valuation. I use term soft infrastructure to signal the cultural and technical integration of this larger evolution — in buildings and cities — away from materiality that is extracted, standardized, shipped and disposed, all with high energy and consequences.

IBA Soft House Curtains. Photography by Michael Moser.

IBA Soft House Exterior. Photography by Michael Moser.

Going back a little now, how did you choose where you studied architecture?

I did my undergraduate thesis on the Romanesque architectures of the Saintonge region of France. Come to think of it, I still enjoy the deep walls and opacity of that architecture [laughs]. But I realized that although I enjoyed writing, I liked those buildings more, and growing up I always was making things in my father’s workshop. I returned to Paris to study theatre at Jussieu, at the Université de Sorbonne and completed my first cycle of architectural studies at l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Tell me about KVA — how you started it, how your role has evolved over the years. What are you focused on these days?

KVA started out in the Castinetti Building. My partner, Juan Frano Violich, and I rented a studio space overlooking the elevated highway in an old clothing factory in the North End of Boston. I recall that just as we were finishing a grant application from the National Endowment for the Arts, the building sprinklers turned on unexpectedly. We had laid out all out all the proposal portfolio pages — all analog at that time — and they got completely ruined. When I called the NEA administrator, I must have sounded so sad that they gave us a grace period to apply, and the Interim Bridges Project, came forth from that grant as an urban archeological exhibition integrated in pedestrian bridges over the Big Dig.

We built that project ourselves with the help of our Local Carpenters Union. It then received the first interdisciplinary Progressive Architecture Award in architecture & urbanism, and it established a pro-active form of practice at KVA, where we question givens and identify problems and ideas. In my role at KVA, I’m a Director of Design and Applied Research, that means that I seek to define contemporary questions and matters of concern that KVA Matx can engage in its work. I still do this and try to identify a longer trajectory of our ideas in our built work and how these can grow and develop in current and new projects we take on.

“Architecture is a fundamental and creative medium that engages time, inhabitation, and materiality. As a discipline, architecture is well positioned as a field in which significant change can and should be explored and made.”

— Sheila Kennedy

Tell me more about the work you’re doing with KVA Matx specifically.

I’m excited about radically reducing the numbers and kinds of materials that go into a building—at KVA Matx, the Soft House in Hamburg, Germany was our first project of mono-material architecture. We eliminated all interior finishes and produced the atmosphere of the dwelling units with structural mass timber and movable textiles that took on the job of creating renewable energy and light.

Since then, we’ve worked with vernacular 2x4’s, FCI certified wood framing and many kinds of solid wood panels and sustainable plywoods. Having in-house workshops at KVA Matx has enabled us to design and develop a whole set of zero-waste flat-to-form architectural components, furniture, and mobile infrastructure in our workshops. These ‘emissaries’ as we call them, often go off and populate our architecture.

What have you learned in the last six months?

I’ve learned how much I enjoy the practice of architecture and learning from teaching. I recently took my first sabbatical and I learned at the same time how important it is to step away from academia to take time to reflect and creatively recharge. At the MIT Department of Architecture, my colleague Caitlin Mueller and I have just launched ODDS & MODS, a new, multi-year research and design platform for material circularity in architecture.

Each year ODDS & MODS platform will focus on the design and technical toolkits for the reuse of a single mono-material. MODS refers to the reuse of standardized materials, overstock and waste, and ODDS refers to geometrically irregular materials, both renewable materials that vary from nature and industrial materials that are broken in waste streams. The goal is to apply design, machine vision and computational techniques to upcycle these so called ‘sub-altern’ materials and explore, fabricate, and test new architectural possibilities for material circularity at scale.

KVA Strano Lab Plant Properties, 2019, Design Triennial Exhibit. Courtesy of KVA.

Who are you admiring now and why?

I’d like to be inclusive as possible in this response. I admire all those who are truly passionate about their architecture, especially when I see this in students and younger architects, because it is all too easy to become cynical, to think that nothing can be done and to turn away from architecture. I also admire more established architects who care for the planet, for plants and people, who try to make the profession of architecture better, and who are still searching for new things to discover in their creative work.

“Never underestimate the power of the architectural imagination...we are constantly bombarded with scripted messages about how things should be, and their designated purpose or function, the rules that must be followed. These messages, however, are not absolutes or givens.”

— Sheila Kennedy

Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?

I’m fortunate to have two amazing daughters, identical twins, both creatives in their different chosen ways. For me it works well to allow for some imbalance of life and work. I found that if I tried to balance life and work only on a daily cycle, I wasn’t fully working, nor fully apart from work. Concentrating my creative work in chunks of time made room for extended and more immersive time for my daughters and I and our family to take and share real adventures, whether at a city wharf, at a local tidepool or much further afield.

In terms of advice for those starting their careers — find what you are most passionate about in architecture and pursue it. Some persistence and the will to make change are necessary. Never underestimate the power of the architectural imagination. This might sound trivial, but it is not, we are constantly bombarded with scripted messages about how things should be, and their designated purpose or function, the rules that must be followed. These messages, however, are not absolutes or givens. The architectural imagination is a caring and powerful capacity for curiosity and critical questioning. It’s a kind of superpower, that can enable the thinking and realization of possible futures in the context of the present and past. If young architects could find a way to do their research and do work that interests them—and if they can find a way to intersect those interests and motivations with larger issues in the world—that would be a sweet spot.