Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye, Assoc. AIA, F. Jason Campbell, Celeste Martore, Brenda (BZ) Zhang, Assoc. AIA
courtesy SPACE INDUSTRIES Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye, Assoc. AIA, F. Jason Campbell, Celeste Martore, Brenda (BZ) Zhang, Assoc. AIA

Firm Name: Space Industries
Location: San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles
Year founded: 2018
Firm leadership: Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye, Assoc. AIA, F. Jason Campbell, Celeste Martore, Brenda (BZ) Zhang, Assoc. AIA

How the founders met: At the University of California at Berkeley, where BZ, Campbell, and Moultrie Daye earned their M.Arch. degrees, Martore her BA, and where Campbell teaches design studios.

Firm mission: We are less interested in what architecture is and more interested in what it can do. For us, architecture is a tool set that we use to give form (built or unbuilt) to our inquiries into society and culture. A way to provoke change in ways both superlative and subtle. An exercise in translation.

Moultrie Daye’s thesis project, “A Critique of Pure Violence,” overlays the quarries that enabled San Francisco’s construction onto the city itself, demonstrating how the act of taking up space can be a violent one.
Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye/Space Industries Moultrie Daye’s thesis project, “A Critique of Pure Violence,” overlays the quarries that enabled San Francisco’s construction onto the city itself, demonstrating how the act of taking up space can be a violent one.
"A Critique of Pure Violence"
Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye/Space Industries "A Critique of Pure Violence"

Personality of your practice: We are activists, Sampha superfans, painters, millennials who won’t get a TikTok, soccer players, (rarely) tardy meeting attendees, book clubbers, Costco club members, Virgos, highly sensitive to color, photographers, Jamaican patty taste-testers, musicians, Craigslist furniture scavengers, songwriters, capoeira students, tactile Luddites dependent on the Adobe suite. But most of all, we are tricksters. We are what we need to be, when we need to be.

“Elsewhere, or Else Where?”, an “architectural fever dream” about the Bay Area, considers how society’s current conceptions of home and elsewhere are flawed, and how architecture can help create a new understanding.
Brenda (BZ) Zhang/Space Industries “Elsewhere, or Else Where?”, an “architectural fever dream” about the Bay Area, considers how society’s current conceptions of home and elsewhere are flawed, and how architecture can help create a new understanding.
“Elsewhere, or Else Where?”
Brenda (BZ) Zhang/Space Industries “Elsewhere, or Else Where?”

One important project and why: The Anti-racism Design Resources document. While we each are navigating the present moment of historic civil rights uprising as individuals, we also had several ideas for how we could participate in movement-building as a collective. Our conversations with each other, and our networks, quickly culminated in this document, which is updated regularly. It is intended to uplift Black design communities and serve as a resource both for communities in need of pro bono design as well as for non-Black and white people to deepen our anti-racism work within design disciplines. We are currently collaborating as part of the Design As Protest Collective to expand its usefulness and reach.

An excerpt from the Anti-racism Design Resources document
courtesy SPACE INDUSTRIES An excerpt from the Anti-racism Design Resources document
Images from the Taxonomy of Spatial Violence project, which used USGS National Elevation Data and scripting tools such as Grasshopper to create renderings of sites of material extraction, including mines, dams, and quarries.
Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye/Space Industries Images from the Taxonomy of Spatial Violence project, which used USGS National Elevation Data and scripting tools such as Grasshopper to create renderings of sites of material extraction, including mines, dams, and quarries.

Another important project and why: One of our first projects was a pro-bono project for a Bay Area social and racial justice nonprofit undergoing an eviction process. We conducted multiple walk-throughs through potential new office spaces, produced as-builts, and provided schematic design drawings and diagrams to assist in conversations they were having about how to reshuffle their staffing, events, and community support programming. For a discipline that is so thoroughly gatekept and siloed, many of our less glamorous skills and tools make a tangible difference in the challenges faced by, and conversations led by, our communities.

The Roots and Branches project, curated by ELL, a Campbell-led arts initiative, turned a storefront space into a record shop, exploring the transaction of culture.
F. Jason Campbell/Space Industries The Roots and Branches project, curated by ELL, a Campbell-led arts initiative, turned a storefront space into a record shop, exploring the transaction of culture.
“Inked Baby,” a performance piece written by Christina Anderson and installed in San Francisco, relies on a design of two overlaid grids in a neighborhood afflicted with toxic soil to tell the story of the intergenerational suffering of a Black family in the Midwest.
Celeste Martore/Space Industries “Inked Baby,” a performance piece written by Christina Anderson and installed in San Francisco, relies on a design of two overlaid grids in a neighborhood afflicted with toxic soil to tell the story of the intergenerational suffering of a Black family in the Midwest.

A third important project and why: The Experiential Space Research Lab through Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. As individuals, we’re coming from Black communities, queer communities, communities of color, movement-building communities, and within them, encounter, engage with, and invent experiential spaces continuously. Our participation in the 2019—2020 Experiential Space Research Lab, through Gray Area Foundation in San Francisco, was an opportunity to bring those experiences and expertise to the largely white and non-Black art and technology worlds. The resulting exhibition, This Will Be The End of You, which ran from February 7 to March 1, 2020, raised questions about environmental racism in Hunters Point, intentionally positioned Black and non-white cultural objects and references within a Western archive typology, and most pressingly, directly challenged Western hegemonic ideas of personhood, which historically were used as weapons to subjugate people by denying their humanity.

Design tool of choice: In our experience, it’s possible to create meaningful spaces with anything; a Revit file, a hammer, Entourage, or a spreadsheet.

“This Will Be The End Of You"
Beth LaBerge “This Will Be The End Of You"
"This Will Be the End of You"
Beth LaBerge "This Will Be the End of You"
“This Will Be The End Of You"
Beth LaBerge “This Will Be The End Of You"

Design trend that should be left behind: Using the “default” white gaze in design to describe a world that, in the words of James Baldwin, “is not white; it never was white, cannot be white.”

The most important piece of criticism you ever received: The encouragement to reappraise our architectural education and the skill set therein. We are attentive to words that reposition architecture simply as a lens, so despite the expectation for young designers to succeed in the current AEC industry model, we have the means to participate in a wider range of concerns, by questioning this model, or by completely unseating it. We’re grateful to Mabel O. Wilson, Renee Chow, AIA, Andrew Atwood, and others for their counsel.

Biggest challenge facing architects today: We believe that the organizations that architects have set up to assist us in our disciplinary duty to serve have actually further severed the ties between architectural workers and the public. As a discipline, our biggest challenge may be ourselves.