Photo by Julie Dodge.

Future Expansion is a Brooklyn based architecture-and-design firm founded in 2011 by Deirdre and Nicholas McDermott. Shortly after starting, the practice won an open RFP from the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a large-scale public art installation. Since, the two have gone on to carry out projects for both private and public clients. They recently completed another winning installation, "Flatiron Reflection," for the fourth annual Flatiron Public Plaza Holiday Design Competition commissioned by the Flatiron/23rd Street Partnership and Van Alen Institute.

For this week's Small Studio Snapshots, Archinect caught up with the firm to hear about some recent projects they are working on and find out what the future has in store.

How many people are in your practice?

So far we’ve fluctuated between three and five depending on the level of activity, but we have a solid core of three.

Why were you originally motivated to start your own practice?

Individually, we’d both arrived at the idea that it was inevitable, and sooner rather than later. Neither of us came from families that clocked a lot of corporate hours—we wanted to work through our own ideas about architecture, to define our own way of operating.

What hurdles have you come across?

Practicing means you’re an architect and a businessperson all at once. That’s not always ideal, but it is invigorating in the sense that it puts you in touch with the full plate of possibilities and issues involved in what it means or might mean to be an architect in the contemporary world. There are a lot of ways to practice, clearly, but how do you convert the things that we do well as a discipline and that makes this an exciting thing to be engaged with—the histories and strategies that we collectively access for example—and make it a viable business? How do you do it in a way that feels personally—and culturally, socially, or artistically—relevant? We’re inspired by the offices and people that we know, and know from a distance, who are able to really pull that off. It’s not easy.

How do you convert the things that we do well as a discipline and make it a viable business? 

How does your work in academia find its way into the work of the practice?

As partners we’re split in half on this one. We’re dedicated to the office as an enterprise unto itself, and teaching is a separate and secondary pursuit, but really important. Architecture isn’t merely a profession, it never has been. Teaching is a vehicle (along with writing and doing exhibitions) for engaging with architecture outside of the profession. Many of the people we’re most inspired by aren’t practicing traditionally, but are fully engaged with architectural thinking through academia and other sympathetic activities. At the same time and somewhat contradictorily, we like the example of the architect setting up shop and using practice as a way of accomplishing many goals—the office understood as an instrument.

What are some projects you are currently working on?

Our projects have diversified recently, and we’ve been able to work with some very interesting clients: small institutions and non-profits in addition to private clients. Luckily, we’ve also had a few clients who we’ve worked with on multiple projects. One of our first clients engaged us again last year to work on a rural property outside New York City. It’s an amazing site, a mix of active agricultural lands, forests, fallow fields and hills. It’s several hundred acres and one of the first steps in the process has been to develop a masterplan to find strategies for how new uses can be overlaid onto the land while at the same time maintaining the existing uses. The goal is to allow a person to experience more of the land on foot, to provide both a way as well as a reason. Currently a few car roads are the main way to get around and they leave much of the landscape inaccessible. We’re working with a breadcrumb trail strategy—where the breadcrumbs are small program pieces—to make new links with a rather light touch.

Another project is an addition for a community focused church in New York, where we are dealing with circulation and accessibility as ways of opening up new views between the church building, an adjacent garden, and the street. We’re working with an extension of the sanctuary ceiling, rendered in similar textures and geometries but with new materials to visually establish these links spiraling down through the three principal levels of the space. When we started that project we surveyed a lot of local churches, looking for patterns and strategies. It made us very aware of how many churches there are and how their role in community life is changing, at least in our part of the world. It’s quite significant, and not much talked about in critical terms as far as we can tell.

We are also working with an international healthcare non-profit that does incredible work around the globe. We’re helping them with new offices. They have been growing quite significantly and are thinking about their working environment to understand how it can be a more intentional part of their identity and what they do.

Is scaling up a goal or would you like to maintain the size of your practice?

We don’t fetishize either end of the spectrum, the goal is to have the right number of people involved

We don’t fetishize either end of the spectrum, the goal is to have the right number of people involved so we can do the things that we want to do and keep the enterprise prosperously afloat. We can imagine a scenario in which that would mean being significantly bigger, but we’re not interested in being big for any innate reason. The big sweatshop model of architecture might not always be bad-business but it is a nightmare of another kind.

What do you think the next step in growing the practice is?

We hope we’re able to continue to attract projects with great clients and that it allows us the opportunity to keep building an office that attracts great staff. We’ve been lucky to have a lot of excellent designers (and personalities) working with us in the office. Doing good work we’re highly engaged with and that engages contemporary life in a rich way is the goal, and we want to grow an office with like minded people.

What are the benefits of having your own practice? And staying small?

Coming out of school there seemed to be two models of independent practice, you could be James Bond or the A-Team. Either you were born with all of the skills and savvy to carry off the whole thing by yourself, effortlessly yet excitingly, or you needed to assemble a van-full of ragtag badasses each with a well honed skill: the explosives guy, the computer chick, the strong guy, the guy who can kick behind his head. You’ve got to be some kind of a person to try the Bond route. Most people are better off in the van. It’s a model of collaboration and shared goals. It’s appealing. Does that answer the question? In the end maybe we ended up with more of a Robin and Batman scenario. Well actually, we’re not at the end, we’re at the beginning.