Hybrids and Composites: BAAO and Pratt Institute's Alexandra Barker on Embracing Change and Future Work in Unexpected Places
Portrait by Adam Elstein.
By Julia Gamolina
Alexandra Barker, FAIA, LEED AP is an architect and educator. She is the principal of Barker Architecture Office, an award-winning practice based in New York and founded in 2006. BAAO brings intelligent, inventive design to a dynamic and multivalent world through work that engages the needs of a broad cross section of diverse inhabitants and sites. BAAO’s portfolio includes institutional, educational and retail projects, ground-up private residences and interiors, as well as community engagement projects in the New York area, regionally, and internationally. Recent projects include City Kids Education Center, Mi Casita Preschool and Cultural Center, and Maple Street Preschool.
Alexandra is also a founder of Pratt Institute’s Graduate Architecture program, where she is currently the Interim Chair and Associate Professor. She is a board member of Design Advocates, a community of designers bringing their expertise to marginalized communities, and a board member of the Hart Island Project, which provides information, support, and storytelling for families of those buried in New York’s public cemetery. In her conversation with Julia Gamolina, Alexandra talks about the evolution of her career alongside the evolution of Pratt’s graduate program, advising those just starting their careers to seek out mentors.
JG: 2024 is shaping up to be a significant year for you — your are interim chair at Pratt GAUD, and of course you're running BAAO. What are you focused on for the rest of the year, and most looking forward to?
AB: We have added landscape architecture to our list of programs in our department, so we are in the process of changing our name to Graduate Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design. That is very exciting, and we are working on ways that the four programs — MARCH, MLA, MSARCH, and MSUD — can exchange students, ideas, sites, and coursework. We are also preparing for an upcoming re-accreditation visit from NAAB for our MARCH program, and for an initial accreditation visit from LAAB for our new program. We are excited to welcome our Critic at Large for 2024-2025, Professor Lydia Kallipoliti. Lydia's research focuses on the intersection. of architecture, technology, and environmental politics and more specifically on waste and reuse, she will be reviewing the work of our fourth semester studio in the MARCH program on waste to energy.
In my office, we have six residential projects under construction across Brooklyn and Manhattan. We also have a rehabilitation center we are designing in Tribeca, and we’re working on a second location for City Kids, the education center we designed in Williamsburg. With Design Advocates, we are just finishing constructing a garden pavilion structure that is the result of four years of collaboration between a group of small firms and workshops with the residents, moms of young children transitioning out of homelessness. We are working with them to create resin cast time capsules that will become an integral part of the structure.
Boerum Hill, photography by Gieves Anderson.
City Kids, photography by Francis Dzikowski Otto.
Now let's come back to the beginning. How did you choose where you studied architecture?
My great-grandfather, Bennett Cardwell, was an architect in Virginia who did residential, civic, and religious buildings. Though he died when I was quite young, I was influenced by him and was interested in architecture at a very early age. I was also interested in medicine and was uncertain which path I would follow, and so I decided to study both. I eventually received a degree in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard College and completed an architecture thesis on co-housing.
During my undergraduate studies I was able to take some courses with faculty in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. I became interested in continuing to work with the faculty there and was fortunate to be admitted so I decided to continue there. At the GSD I was able to continue to study housing and completed a thesis on mixed-use housing that received the thesis prize as well as the housing prize that year. I ended up doing my thesis with George Baird and was heavily influenced by his book, The Space of Appearance, which examined the philosophy of phenomenology through social interactions and reference Hannah Arendt, Henri LeFebvre, Mikhail Bahktin, and other theorists. I framed my thesis on a study of how different types of social interactions create space, and how design can, in turn, foster social interactions.
At the GSD I was fortunate to have several faculty mentors who were women practitioners and educators. My core studio instructors included Linda Pollak, Sheila Kennedy, and Monica Ponce de Leon. When I was in my last year, Toshiko Mori joined the faculty, and I eventually ended up working for her. These women faculty all had research interests that resonated with me, including material research and the intersection of architecture, infrastructure, and geography.
“Pratt’s Graduate Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design department is led by four female leaders in the design professions, which is amazing and unusual. I’m excited about the opportunities for us to collaborate on potential curricular crossovers between programs and to explore new ideas with global travel and education.”
Tell me about BAAO — why you started, how it has evolved over the years. What are you focused on these days?
I started my own office in 2006. I had been working for Toshiko Mori for almost seven years and was ready to go out on my own — I had moved to Brooklyn and started a family. I was able to launch my firm with a number of residential projects in Manhattan, including Upper West Side apartments and Tribeca loft renovations. I was also fortunate to have been chosen as a member of the Ordos 100, a group of young architects working on a housing development in China led by Ai Wei Wei and Herzog and De Meuron. We also completed lots of speculative competitions. Between commissioned and speculative projects I was working at very different scales that reflected my interest in the intersection of architecture, art, science, and technology.
As my children reached school age in the mid 2000’s, my Brooklyn network increased, and we expanded into Brooklyn townhouse renovations. We also received commissions to design replacement houses on sensitive waterfront sites in Queens in a neighborhood, Breezy Point, that had been decimated by Superstorm Sandy. Over time, we were able to expand into other types of work, including educational spaces, wellness facilities, and offices. We are often asked to accommodate animals, plants, and environments in our work. Design for communities who typically do not have a voice in shaping their spaces is another area of focus. Designing for multiple perspectives and needs has become central to our approach.
We also continue to do speculative projects. Enveloping Grounds is a project that investigates retrofitting existing building fabric with energy-generating panels comprised of algae embedded in cast hempcrete. We exhibited that project as part of Experimental Landings, an ACSA Teacher’s Conference exhibition co-hosted by Pratt Institute that was mounted in Nolan Park on Governor’s Island in 2022.
House for booklovers and cats. Photography by Francis Dzikowski Otto.
Surfboard house. Photography by Francis Dzikowski Otto.
With your own career in academia, what are the most important things for those wanting to become architects these days to have as their foundation?
Aspiring architects should be curious citizens of the world, dedicated to expanding the agency of design to engage in civic, economic, and environmental spheres. They should be prepared to approach the design of building and living environments as a complex and evolving field of study that requires asking challenging questions and developing opportunistic and unexpected strategies.
As an educator and administrator of graduate programs, I encourage people with a wide variety of backgrounds to consider studying architecture at the graduate level. Your experience in business, dance, biology, or literature will bring a valuable perspective to your education and your academic community and will help shape your unique contributions to the field.
Looking back at your career at large again, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
My first challenge was getting a job after I graduated from the GSD. It was 1998, and there was a bit of a lull in job opportunities in Boston. I decided to make the leap to New York. I was able to land a position at the office of my former professors, Adam Yarinsky and Stephen Cassell of Architecture Resource Office, but moving to New York was a huge challenge. I didn’t know anyone, and I moved into an apartment by myself in the East Village. I stayed there one night when I realized that it was infested with cockroaches and the sink drain pipe wasn’t even fully connected! Water just poured into the cabinet.
Fortunately, I was able to find another apartment — next to a funeral home! — in the West Village. The next challenge was when I realized that there were lots of young people at ARO and it was going to take time for me to be able to move into any position of responsibility. So, I ended up getting a job with Toshiko Mori. Toshiko gave me lots of responsibility right away — I was managing a single-family house project on an island in Maine and a 33,000 square foot adaptive reuse of a mill in Georgia. It was fantastic preparation for running my own firm.
Then when I began teaching, the challenge was that I arrived at Pratt as an outsider. My educational background as a graduate from the GSD in Cambridge, was vastly different from that of my colleagues, most of whom had graduated from Columbia in New York. I was embarking on a career teaching at Pratt, a renowned institute of art and design, with a strong tradition of making, experimentation, and speculation. It was incredibly challenging but also rewarding to engage with completely different ideas about architecture than those I had been taught during my education. It was as if I was able to get another degree. Now that I have been at Pratt for over two decades, I am the insider, but I am always looking for new perspectives to contribute to the culture of the school.
“Women are often asked to do the work that requires more negotiation with context or between parties. I see that as a constraint that can create powerful results when approached as an opportunity.”
Teaching at Pratt myself, I can attest that you are doing just that! With this, what have you also learned in the last six months?
Since I have assumed the role of Interim Chair, I have become invested in accreditation efforts at the school, which are an opportunity to take stock of the mission and curriculum of the department. As I mentioned, we recently added a Master’s in Landscape Architecture program, and we are in the process of investigating the potentialities of crossover between our two professional and two post-professional curriculums.
To do that, I am conducting a deep review of our MS in Urban Design program, led by Ariane Lourie Harrison, as well as our MS in Architecture, led by Jing Liu. I am also learning about our landscape program, which is led by director Rosetta Elkin. It is only the second landscape program in New York City, and the only one that works from the regional scale to the local scale.
What are you most excited about right now?
Pratt’s Graduate Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design department is led by four female leaders in the design professions, which is amazing and unusual. I’m excited about the opportunities for us to collaborate on potential curricular crossovers between programs and to explore new ideas with global travel and education. We have started discussing a few possible partnerships with other institutions and industries to expand opportunities for experimentation and research for our students and faculty.
In my most recent studio work, I partnered with the Billion Oyster Project and the NYC EDC on investigating abandoned waterfront infrastructure along the New York waterfront. The studio proposed reimaging these sites as industrial mixed-use projects that combine light manufacturing programs like aquaculture with public spaces and community facilities. This keeps with my interest in exploring projects that are hybrids and composites between existing and proposed, between architecture and infrastructure, and between art and science.
Who are you admiring now and why?
I visited Portugal with Pratt faculty recently, and we visited Amorim Cork. It was exciting to see all the ways the company is investigating the potential of cork, which is a 100% sustainable and renewable material. They are investigating different composites that can take advantage of cork's impermeability, buoyancy, and low thermal conductivity. I'm excited about the possibility of exploring other potentials of cork in architecture and design. We also toured the Vista Alegre Museum and were able to see the decades of experimentation and design work they have done with porcelain.
I was also fortunate to meet Alvaro Siza and I was so impressed with his work at the Porto Architecture School and the Leca Swimming Pools. His spatial moves still amaze me. I was studying his work through books when I was a student in the mid-1990’s, so I had him sign my 30-year-old El Croquis monograph of his work. He is 90 and still designing. I would love to be doing that when I am his age.
Finally, last summer I went on a tour of Alvar and Aino Aalto's projects and living environments in Finland. I loved seeing their architecture, furniture, and design objects all together, mixed in with other pieces they collected. I was inspired by the environments they created through design work at many different scales.
Upper West Side Triplex. Photography by Gieves Anderson.
Enveloping Grounds. Image courtesy of BAAO.
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'm a philomath. I have an insatiable urge to learn new things, and I would like to share that love of learning with students, faculty, employees, collaborators, and clients. In architecture, there is so much complexity and breadth to the field that you can delve into if you continue to remain open to new experiences. I’m excited that I can continue to shift and expand my understanding of the possibilities of design with every new person, place, or project I encounter.
Designing for the diversity of inhabitants in a project and working collaboratively are core values in my work. So is embracing change and testing the agency and limits of design’s impact on living and building environments. I also believe in the importance of working with existing building fabric when possible. The constraints of existing conditions are great seeds for innovation. At Pratt, fifty percent of our core studio projects are additions and alterations to existing structures. We believe that teaching our students to work with existing building fabric is absolutely central to their education as responsible architects of the future.
Pratt's graduate department is only twenty-three years old, and we have established an incredible set of programs with a rich community of faculty, students, graduates, and collaborators that is broad, diverse, and impactful at multiple scales in an extensive array of environments. Still, I'm excited to help initiate a new chapter in the department that continues to build on my core values of curiosity and experimentation and designing spaces for diverse inhabitants that are adaptable to environmental change.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
Architecture takes luck and contacts but mostly lots of energy, persistence, and open-mindedness. When I started out, I thought I had a clear idea of the kinds of projects I would take on, and the type of work I would do, but I’ve found over time that I have become much more open to a much broader array of opportunities than I thought I would have entertained when I was first starting out. I remember early on working for Toshiko, and she was completely open to projects that were additions and alterations to modern structures by famous architects. When we were working on projects that involved creating a careful dialogue with the existing conditions it became a much more challenging project but also a much more formally and spatially complex one and thus more rewarding. Women are often asked to do the work that requires more negotiation with context or between parties. I see that as a constraint that can create powerful results when approached as an opportunity.
Some other pieces of advice — firstly, seek out mentors. Find faculty that are doing what you think you want to do and ask them questions. Find out what their life is really like. For women, if you can find a woman mentor, all the better. Their life choices may align more closely with choices you might find yourself in a position to make. Then. don’t say no to work that will help build your portfolio and expand your area of expertise, but be strategic about projects you do for the experience that do not offer proper compensation. You do not want to get locked into getting paid less than you deserve. Finally, don’t forget to have a life! Making connections with people is a way to find future work in unexpected places. You never know when a social situation might become an opportunity.