Courtesy After Architecture

Firm name: After Architecture
Location: Blacksburg, Va.
Year founded: 2012
Firm leadership: Katie MacDonald, Assoc. AIA, and Kyle Schumann
Education: MacDonald: B.Arch., Cornell University; M.Arch. Harvard Graduate School Of Design; Schumann: B.Arch., Cornell University; M.Arch., Princeton University
Experience: MacDonald: Ofis Arhitekti, Morphosis Architects, Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, MALL; currently teaches at Virginia Tech; Schumann: Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, Anmahian Winton Architects; has taught at Cornell University and Syracuse University and currently teaches at Virginia Tech
How founders met: Freshman architecture studio at Cornell
Firm size: two-plus

This residential proposal reconceives the modern house archetype by reassigning the typical red brick core to an outer black brick shell, which allows for a central courtyard where solar energy is harvested to heat the building at night.
Courtesy After Architecture This residential proposal reconceives the modern house archetype by reassigning the typical red brick core to an outer black brick shell, which allows for a central courtyard where solar energy is harvested to heat the building at night.

Mission:
We seek to elevate the everyday and call attention to the ordinary—unseen histories, cultural identities, construction conventions, building typologies—by tweaking, revealing, rearranging, subverting, and reframing to create appreciation for that which would otherwise go unnoticed.

Origin of firm name:
While we love the process of designing architecture, we are not convinced that it has to be limited to the discipline. “After” alludes to our desire to root our work in history and our ambition to pursue a post-disciplinary scope of work.

Located outside the San Diego Marriott Marquis and Marina, this installation features a grid of undulating posts evoking “waves and wavelengths,” according to the firm.
Courtesy After Architecture Located outside the San Diego Marriott Marquis and Marina, this installation features a grid of undulating posts evoking “waves and wavelengths,” according to the firm.
Courtesy After Architecture

First commission:
Our first commission was a permanent installation, Field of Towers, in a waterfront plaza in San Diego. Shortly after graduating from Cornell, we completed an installation, Lightwave, in the Cornell Botanic Gardens for the Cornell Council for the Arts. After the project was published, a hotelier contacted us about designing a larger scale version of the project. We were only a few months out of school and found ourselves working by day on our first full time jobs, and by night on registering our business, corresponding with the client, arranging site visits, and hiring a lawyer to review contracts.

The Camp Barker Memorial at Garrison Elementary School in Washington, D.C., harkens back to the site’s original use as a barracks for Civil War soldiers that ultimately housed slaves who had recently escaped the South.
Courtesy After Architecture The Camp Barker Memorial at Garrison Elementary School in Washington, D.C., harkens back to the site’s original use as a barracks for Civil War soldiers that ultimately housed slaves who had recently escaped the South.
Courtesy After Architecture

Favorite project:
Our most recent project, the Camp Barker Memorial, has been a breakthrough piece because it confronts a powerful historical moment currently hidden from view. Composed of a series of entry portals to a modern-day elementary school in Washington, D.C., the project calls attention to the site’s past as a Civil War–era refugee camp for those escaping slavery. The portals take form as a folding plane that incorporates a central gateway as well as smaller shelters that engage the scale of the child, inviting young students to grapple with America’s fraught history.

The duo describe this cabin located in Sackville, New Brunswick, as an “occupiable hearth” constructed with timber from the surrounding forest.
Courtesy After Architecture The duo describe this cabin located in Sackville, New Brunswick, as an “occupiable hearth” constructed with timber from the surrounding forest.

Second favorite project:
Hearth was originally designed for a cabin competition and was more recently adapted for a client in Vermont. The design plays with the tropes of the archetypal backwoods log cabin—the log façade, the chimney, the porch, and the stack of firewood out front—integrating each discrete element into a seamless wrapper. This project was pivotal in shaping our thinking about typology and reinterpreting architectural tropes.

Located outside the Boston Children’s Museum, Twofold is designed as a bench for adults and a table for children.
Courtesy Design Museum Boston Located outside the Boston Children’s Museum, Twofold is designed as a bench for adults and a table for children.

Design hero:
We recently conducted a research fellowship to study the work of Edoardo Gellner, an Italian architect who studied with Carlo Scarpa and practiced in the Italian Dolomites. We came to know of him because he built a company vacation town, Villaggio Eni, on the mountainside above Kyle’s ancestral village of Borca di Cadore. Gellner’s work fuses the “anonymous” vernacular of alpine barns and ski chalets with modernist concerns around concrete, structure, color, and organic design. We appreciate the work’s simultaneous sensitivity to context and rigor in advancing architectural expression.

The Fossa Olfactoria installation features balloons filled with scented oil placed behind a “fleshy fabric membrane” to highlight the connection between the olfactory system (responsible for our sense of smell) and tactile experiences.
Courtesy After Architecture and Make Think Design The Fossa Olfactoria installation features balloons filled with scented oil placed behind a “fleshy fabric membrane” to highlight the connection between the olfactory system (responsible for our sense of smell) and tactile experiences.

The best advice you have ever gotten:
You will not get an opportunity that you do not pursue.

What design trend needs to come back?
Public space. We both studied abroad in Rome during college, where life happens in the streets and piazzas. An attention to public gathering space with that level of integration into the city fabric is harder to come by in the U.S.

One design trend to leave behind:
Gradients. We see gradients as a manifestation of the pop image culture surrounding media consumption today, where aesthetics are often valued over substance. They are pretty, but they have become a kind of window dressing. We are more interested in the windows.

Located at the Cornell Botanic Gardens, in Ithaca, N.Y., this multicolored sculptural bench comprises a grid of 264 CNC-milled square timbers.
Courtesy After Architecture Located at the Cornell Botanic Gardens, in Ithaca, N.Y., this multicolored sculptural bench comprises a grid of 264 CNC-milled square timbers.

The best criticism you’ve ever received:
Schumann: The late Professor Arthur Ovaska of Cornell University diagnosed me with “corneritis” during one of my first building projects in a second year studio. Symptoms of corneritis include an obsessive over-defining of space through articulation of closed corners. I am thankful to have received such an early diagnosis, and my plans have never been the same.

Favorite destination for architecture:
Los Angeles—Katie’s hometown—where the weird thrives and insulation is less critical.

Designed in collaboration with New York practice Make, Think, Design, this whimsical garden concept was named a 2018 finalist for the annual Ragdale Ring Competition, hosted by the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Ill. The proposal calls for an undulating circular typography that surrounds a theater accented with a faux tree that offers shade, shelter, and an area to install lighting and scenery.
Courtesy After Architecture and Make Think Design Designed in collaboration with New York practice Make, Think, Design, this whimsical garden concept was named a 2018 finalist for the annual Ragdale Ring Competition, hosted by the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Ill. The proposal calls for an undulating circular typography that surrounds a theater accented with a faux tree that offers shade, shelter, and an area to install lighting and scenery.
Courtesy After Architecture and Make Think Design

Favorite rule to break:
Traditional modes of practice, sometimes by choice and sometimes by necessity. Today’s economy makes it difficult to build a traditional practice at a young age. We believe that there is a certain energy that young practices and students bring to the profession that is often undercut by existing power structures. By circumventing the traditional path, new voices can find a platform.