Yale's Katie Colford on Rethinking Permanence, Curating Knowledge, and Humor in Architecture
By Julia Gamolina
Katie Colford received her B.A. from Yale College in 2016 and is currently in her final year of the M.Arch I program at the Yale School of Architecture. Her work spans design, research, writing, and teaching. She has worked professionally in New York and Tokyo, and her research has been supported by grants from the Istanbul Design Biennial and others. In addition to her graduate studies, she has been a Teaching Fellow for a number of undergraduate architecture courses at Yale College, and she is currently a humor columnist for the student journal Paprika!. Her work can be found at katiecolford.com.
JG: Tell me about your foundational years - how you grew up, what you liked to do, and what some of your most memorable experiences were.
KC: I grew up in a suburb of New York City in a Tudor house where my parents lived for many years. I never thought of the house as “architecture”; it was just home. But all along, of course, it was shaping my understanding of space. In the kitchen, for example, there were two steps which formed the perfect height for a seat, nestled between the cabinets. My mother and I would have lunch on the steps sometimes, calling it a “picnic” to distinguish it from a regular meal at the table. How quickly two steps can be transformed into an enchanted meadow with a bit of imagination and a sandwich! It’s a fond memory that I now realize instilled a foundational concept of architecture as a “field of play,” to borrow Jill Stoner’s term from Toward a Minor Architecture.
See Sea Changes.
Creatures.
Why did you decide to study architecture? How did you choose where you studied architecture?
As an undergraduate at Yale, I stumbled into “Introduction to Architecture” seeking a drawing course. Professor Emeritus Alec Purves spent the first lecture discussing just one building—Louis Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art. Needless to say, I had found much more than a drawing class. With each lecture, the city felt like it was unfolding before my eyes. Six years after that first lecture, I decided to return to Yale as a graduate student because of its uniquely broad community of scholars in the arts and humanities—from graphic designers to theater directors to environmental historians—many of whom I have had the privilege of collaborating with over the past few years.
What was the favorite project you worked on in school? Favorite paper you wrote? Favorite extracurricular?
In my first semester studio in graduate school, which was taught by Nikole Bouchard, I began to rethink the supposed permanence of the built environment. Instead, I asked: How might impermanence, decay, and change over time offer something productive—not destructive—for architecture? My studio project that semester, titled See / Sea Changes, was a first attempt at an answer. I imagined a waterfront building that would flood with rising sea levels. This flooding would not mean the building’s death; quite the opposite, the decomposition would allow for the regeneration of the surrounding salt marsh ecosystem.
This question of productive decay has prompted a range of investigations in my subsequent academic work. For example, I worked with my classmate Audrey Tseng Fischer on a project titled Unearthing / Attending, in which we examined issues of health, safety, and welfare in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. We suggested that architects could attend to the health, safety, and welfare of the neighborhood by using architecture to bear witness to environmental injustices, like air pollution. Our project envisioned ways to make this invisible harm visible and to cultivate alternative infrastructures of care.
My continued work on this topic has taken the form of an independent study completed last spring and an ongoing research project supported by a grant from the Istanbul Design Biennial’s “Designing Resilience” program. It has led me to interview scholars in fields as wide-ranging as data activism, museum conservation, and cultural geography, whose work has inspired me to think and rethink how architecture can play a role in building more equitable communities.
“I think it is important for architects to address the question, How do we know what we know? Architecture is one way of ordering knowledge.”
What are some of the initiatives you’ve focused on in school, and why?
I am a Graduate Fellow for Yale’s 2021-22 Mellon Sawyer Seminar “The Order of Multitudes.” The goal of the seminar is to explore three influential forms of curating knowledge—the atlas, encyclopedia, and museum—and to consider how we can build more inclusive knowledge systems in our world of big data. I became involved in this seminar because I think it is important for architects to address the question, How do we know what we know? Architecture is one way of ordering knowledge. By uncovering its “knowledge politics,” as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa terms it in Matters of Care, we may find new modes of practicing architecture that focus increasingly on “thinking with care.”
I’ve also been experimenting with other modes of intellectual expression that aren’t conventionally academic. This semester, I began writing a recurring humor column called “Do You Read Me?” for Paprika!, which is the student-run architectural journal at Yale. What I love about humor writing is that it allows me to communicate something that’s actually very serious without being heavy-handed or unduly explicit. I can talk about real issues in the discipline of architecture in a way that I hope will prompt further dialogue—and perhaps a chuckle!
When searching for internships and jobs, what are you looking for?
Good question! Searching for a job will definitely become a reality for me in the coming months. In all seriousness, I hope to join a firm that values details. I’m thinking of the “research methodology” employed by the scholar Fernando Dominguez-Rubio in his book Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Art Museum: “...everything matters, no matter how small, trivial, or banal, unless proven otherwise.” I think this earnest yet humorous attitude is well suited to the practice of architecture. Respect for details and for what might be considered mundane translates to a practice of care. I look for practices that consider care at all scales—from the office itself to the communities in which their work is built.
As You Keep It.
What’s important to you? What inspires you?
I’m always learning from faculty, scholars, artists, and practitioners whose work inspires me. A recent example is Sumayya Vally, who gave a lecture at Cooper Union last year about her practice Counterspace Studio that I was able to watch via Zoom. She presented her work as a video which beautifully collaged images and audio. It seemed like each project had its own atmosphere—its own color, speed, and mood. I was so inspired by the way that she challenges our inherited ways of seeing and creates work for which there is no precedent.
I am also inspired by the students with whom I interact as a Teaching Fellow for an undergraduate architecture course. They share new ways of thinking about space that nearly knock the wind out of me. One student recently described her drawing in response to an assignment about daylight. She noted of the room she was sketching in the early morning, “I realized there was no one there except for the sun and me.” How extraordinary! In the midst of the ongoing pandemic, she is finding joy in the collegiality of sunlight streaking across an empty room.
What do you hope to do in your career?
That’s the big question, isn’t it? The closest I can come to answering it right now is to refer to a favorite author of mine—Rebecca Solnit. Of course, “author” is much too narrow a term to describe someone whose work spans map-making, historiography, memoir, humor, activism. But it’s true—her work has a habit of emerging in the form of books. If I can admit to this very lofty hope, I aspire to have a career in architecture like that of Solnit’s in writing—doing work that spans many disciplines and modes, from teaching to designing, but which has a habit of materializing in the form of three-dimensional space.
“Respect for details and for what might be considered mundane translates to a practice of care. I look for practices that consider care at all scales—from the office itself to the communities in which their work is built.”
Who do you look up to? It could be those in the industry or not.
That question could take a lifetime to answer. I wish I could list all the practitioners, scholars, friends, and family whom I admire but I will limit myself to just a few.
I look up to Trattie Davies and Jonathan Toews, at whose firm I worked for three years before graduate school — Davies Toews Architecture. I learned from them the importance of finding beauty and joy in the everyday—from the earliest design sketches to the layers of a wall section to the construction photos of a field observation report. They taught me to think at multiple scales at once: to keep in mind the overarching goals of a project and see them through all the way to how a wall meets the floor. I am so grateful to them for the trust they placed in me.
I am also fortunate enough to call Nikole Bouchard—my first-year studio critic at Yale—a valued mentor. Nikole’s recently published book, Waste Matters: Adaptive Reuse for Productive Landscapes, has been for me a touchstone of work that bridges between design and scholarship. She continues to inspire me to always ask questions and to take play seriously.
Three Landscapes.
Unearthing Attending.
What are you excited about right now?
Something that I find very exciting is how the definition of architecture continues to expand beyond the design and construction of buildings. The practice of architecture can include making books, websites, and videos, too. Indeed, buildings are not always the answer! But there are many ways in which architects can bring imagination into the world.
Finally, what advice would you give to those in high school now, choosing their field of study?
My advice to young students is: Begin keeping your own library. Save in one place the images, quotes, articles, and—my favorite—course syllabi that speak to you. Your collections may reveal the key questions and ideas that are central to the way you think, see, and, perhaps, design.