French 2D

Firm name: French 2D
Location: Boston
Year founded: 2008
Firm leadership: Anda French, AIA, and Jenny French
Education: Anda: B.A., Barnard College; M.Arch., Princeton University; Jenny: B.A., Dartmouth College; M.Arch., Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD)

Experience: Anda: While establishing our firm, I taught at the Syracuse University School of Architecture, as well as in the Barnard + Columbia Architecture program. Right out of Princeton, I worked directly for Bob Hillier, FAIA, at Studio Hillier, to understand how to run a firm. Jenny: I spent the year after grad school on a traveling fellowship to study the sites of unbuilt projects. I’ve worked for SHoP Architects, learned retail design at Bergmeyer Associates, and I currently teach core studio at the GSD.

How founders met: Jenny was born, which resulted in our meeting. [They are sisters]

Firm size: Two to four

Nat Ward Vic’s Bagel Bar in Manhattan (now closed) includes a custom ruffled-mesh metal ceiling installation that spans the length of the restaurant, diffusing light and masking the irregular ceiling above.

Mission:
Our practice reworks social, spatial, and visual norms. We use storytelling as a way into our projects (the stories we tell ourselves) and to present to our clients (the stories we tell other people). We project origin myths and future destinies onto given problems, objects, and places. Current projections include two categories that we call “strange housing,” meaning microhousing, co-housing, and adaptive reuse, and “sets in the city”—civically engaged installations and building-scale graphics.

First commission:
We designed a bagel shop in Manhattan that turned into an after-hours party space at night. The former tenants left a wild wavy ceiling that we used as the base for a hanging topography of metal mesh—used for commercial coffee filters—strung up on hospital curtain tracks. We installed late into the night of Valentine’s Day in 2009, with no heat. The client did bring us a bottle of bourbon, so it was all worth it.

Favorite project:
We are working with a group of 30 families that is self-developing an urban co-housing community in greater Boston. Not only is this a chance to rethink housing typologies, resilience, and social models, it is an exercise in inventing our own participatory design process. We’ve taken the lessons learned from our recently completed 180-unit microhousing project, 1047 Comm. Ave, and amplified the ethos of small living with shared resources and collaborative processes.

courtesy French 2D French 2D is working with 30 families for its Cohousing Community apartment project in Malden, Mass. The building includes floor plans ranging from micro-studio to three-bedroom units with shared community spaces. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2018.

Second favorite project:
We are working on an an architectural and social art installation called Place/Setting for HUBweek, Boston’s art, science, and technology festival. It is designed to host intimate dinner conversations, made semi-transparent to help the public understand how ideas are shared within and amongst organizations and experts in the city.

We will host a series of public meals with themes revolving around the growing disparity in income in greater Boston and the arenas in which this is being addressed: housing, urban agriculture, civic engagement, cooperative economic models, and media and gentrification. The installation has to be both intimate and public, creating semi-enclosure, false depth, and reflection to underscore how these conversations can spill out, and multiply to create change. This project builds off of the ambitions of our proposal for MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program, in which furry building backdrops would house audio sensors to record and share stories of local resources and resilience.

courtesy French 2D The duo is collaborating with media and technology researcher Gabriel Mugar (Anda’s husband) on their Place/Setting installation for an event in Boston. Decorated with colorful and reflective surfaces, Place/Setting will host five public, themed meals relating to the growing income disparity in the Boston area.

Origin of firm name:
Our name comes from our shared lack of depth perception that continues to influence our work. There are also two of us. We have been toying with some subsidiary and alter-ego names—French & Sister is one of them. Mohsen Mostafavi, Intl. Assoc. AIA, suggested that we be called Frenchies.

Design heroes:
Charles and Ray Eames for their playful, experimental work, and far reaching influence across disciplines.

Modern-day design heroes:
Wes Anderson for his immersive stories and the exuberant, mannered environments in which those stories exist. Odile Decq for her unapologetic boldness.

courtesy French 2D This 2013 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program finalist, titled White Noise, is a sound-sharing environment composed of large, white, synthetic turf–covered geometric volumes with embedded speakers. To encourage participation and community within the space, visitors are invited to share sounds via a cellphone app, which are then transmitted through the volumes.

Special item in your studio space:
Our double-sided desk set up with a giant screen at one end for sharing. We are generally within a 3-foot radius of each other when we’re working.

Design tool of choice:
Toy-like models and conversations via sketch—digital or analog.

Memorable learning experience:
We’ve learned to quickly adapt at new client or construction meetings, often with a host of personalities and crises all happening at once. We call this getting "quantum-leaped" into a situation.

When we’re not working in architecture, we are:
Working on our multiverse themed romance novel.