Fellow Fellows is a series that focuses on the role fellowships play in architecture academia today. These prestigious academic positions can bring forth a fantastic blend of practice, research, and pedagogical cross-pollination, often within a tight time frame. They also, by definition, represent temporary, open-ended, and ultimately precarious employment for aspiring young designers and academics. Fellow Fellows aims to understand what these positions offer for both the fellows themselves and the discipline at large by presenting their work and experiences through an in-depth interview. Fellow Fellows is about bringing attention and inquiry to the otherwise maddening pace of academia, while also presenting a broad view of the exceptional and breakthrough work being done by people navigating the early parts of their careers.
This week, we Archinect connected with Jonathan Rieke, M.Arch graduate of Harvard GSD and the recipient of the 2018-2019 Schidlowski Emerging Faculty Fellow at The Kent State University College of Architecture and Urban Design. Rieke chats with Archinect about his research and his experiences during and after the fellowship. Rieke shares, "The fellowship was a great way to exercise some ideas I had developed during my thesis semester at the GSD and had been working on through other teaching appointments in the years since. It was a crescendo of a specific trajectory of thinking and a good way to test out some theoretical concerns that have consistently guided my design process."
The focus of my research was on the ways that the toolkit of post-digital architecture has transformed paradigmatic problems of architectural formation.
What fellowship were you in and what brought you to that fellowship?
I was the 2018-2019 Schidlowski Emerging Faculty Fellow at The Kent State University College of Architecture and Urban Design. I joined the faculty at Kent State after a year of teaching in the architecture department at The Ohio State University on a joint appointment with my design partner Emily Mohr. We were both recent M.Arch graduates from the GSD and GSAPP and alumni of the undergraduate architecture program at OSU, so Ohio was a familiar place to return to and test out some ideas that we had been carrying around since grad school.
What was the focus of your fellowship research?
Much of this research was conducted through a series of design exercises that attempted to re-contextualize historical architectural paradigms and conceptual frameworks through computational physics.
The focus of my research was on the ways that the toolkit of post-digital architecture has
transformed paradigmatic problems of architectural formation. Much of this research was
conducted through a series of design exercises that attempted to re-contextualize
historical architectural paradigms and conceptual frameworks through computational
physics. One design studio, for instance, focused on the legacy of Robert Venturi’s
billboard-building proposals in Northeast Ohio (borrowing from the “3 Buildings for a
Small Town in Ohio” project), while a seminar looked at ways in which to procedurally
generate a digital grotto. The largest undertaking of the fellowship was the gallery
exhibition in Kent State’s Armstrong Gallery which sought to build a 1:1 model of the
gallery inside of itself, albeit in a transformed state wherein the gallery was folded up
inside of itself and its surfaces were made to negotiate their own thicknesses and the
constraints of the parent space’s volume.
What did you produce? Teach? And exhibit during that time?
I taught two topic studios, a freshman design studio, a seminar, and co-taught an architecture and urban design studio with my partner Emily Mohr. I produced and exhibited a model of a room at 1:1 scale that was built inside of the gallery at the school. The exhibition was titled “The Developed Surface” after Robin Evans’s nearly synonymous essay on Robert Adam’s interior representations.
In this sense, the fellowship was a sort of year-long performance or practice, that initiated my current career trajectory: architectural practice.
How has the fellowship advanced or become a platform for your academic and professional career?
The fellowship was a great way to exercise some ideas I had developed during my thesis semester at the GSD and had been working on through other teaching appointments in the years since. It was a crescendo of a specific trajectory of thinking and a good way to test out some theoretical concerns that have consistently guided my design process. In this sense, the fellowship was a sort of year-long performance or practice, that initiated my current career trajectory: architectural practice.
What are you working on now, and how is it tied to the work done during the fellowship?
Currently, I am fully invested in practice, working as a designer at The Los Angeles Design Group and periodically diving into small projects with my partner Emily Mohr underneath the umbrella appellation MR Studio.
Architecture schools should act as disciplinary laboratories that exist adjacent to the professional practice of architecture and test possible models for practice in which advocacy can be added to the professional scope of services.
Where do you see the future of academia headed? What do you hope to see as schools begin to address today’s issues of social and political unrest?
The academy has the opportunity to base its work in a sharply focused critique of our existing social, political, legal, and economic formations and examine the ways in which structural inequities have been manifest in the built environment of this country. Architecture schools should act as disciplinary laboratories that exist adjacent to the professional practice of architecture and test possible models for practice in which advocacy can be added to the professional scope of services.
Katherine is an LA-based writer and editor. She was Archinect's former Editorial Manager and Advertising Manager from 2018 – January 2024. During her time at Archinect, she's conducted and written 100+ interviews and specialty features with architects, designers, academics, and industry ...
12 Comments
i like andrew holder, but i don't understand his work--so i also don't understand this. however johnathan is an a+ guy so its nice to see him having success.
sigh. pretty and well done, but same old same old. the "avant-garde" of the profession needs to snap out of it's tautological, inward facing conversation if it wants to find real cultural relevance. in other words: who is the audience here?
There is an audience, albeit a rather limited one. There are certainly faculty and students interested in the work that LADG, Millions, T-E-A-M and the other UCLA alumni from the late 00s/early 10s that have found employment in quite a few design schools in the US, such as the GSD, Yale, UCLA, Syracuse, UIC, and Michigan. The winners of prizes such as the NY League Prize are a pretty good list of who's hot (From North America) in school right now. The work is concerned with the production of images and representations of buildings, both visualized and constructed (mostly in an abstract fashion). There aren't many built projects outside the occasional pavilion and retail interior although some are working on buildings as large as multifamily homes (French 2D) - where the theoretical isn't as evident. Is it insular? Well, as far as the designers concerned mostly publish, converse, lecture, and teach each other in a half dozen schools around the country - yes. But that unfortunately has been the norm with academic architectural discourses for decades - designers who try to reach out to the public are either social-minded (MASS for instance) or unfortunately criticized as sell-outs (BIG). OMA in the 00s rode the academic wave to commercial relevance but that really was the last time serious theory found mainstream acclaim. So yes, the discourse remains quite insular. In the face of all this social upheaval we're in the midst of - as well as the technological changes the AEC business is going through, finding a nexus between these theoretical and the imperative to innovate in the construction site is a challenge. The older generation - Leong Leong, SO-IL, H&Y, nArchitects - have graduated into building ever larger projects and theorizing less. Perhaps these young practices will go the same way eventually as the realities of running a viable practice persuades them to meld their academic interests with client needs?
The younger European architects seem have more impressive bodies of work and different preoccupations than their American contemporaries. I guess the opportunities to work on public-funded work is mroe readily available in some European countries - not to mention a cultural affinity for building.
as usual there is a relevant Calvin and Hobbes on this subject: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2013/12/01/?view=full
Sigh - What a whiny little brat comment.
Sigh - Are you really saying there shouldn't be room for this kind of exploration in Architecture? No inward conversations too?
Sigh - Guess it's not ok to talk about Architecture exploration in an academic setting.
Sigh - Just because you are clearly not the audience doesn't mean it is not relevant.
Sigh - Using vague buzz phrases like 'real culture relevance' means absolutely nothing.
assuming this is directed towards me (try reply?). "whiny little brat," this is funny considering the defensive and unsubstantial response. my comment doesn't suggested that this type of work shouldn't exist at all, just that the field is already inundated with it, and that for a profession that is based on a service model, maybe having a broader impact (arguably an important thing in a time of crisis?) might be featuring and pursing work that speaks to anyone other than other only architects, and a small sub-set at that. if work like this is going to be given a platform through fellowships and publications, it's fair game for criticism (clearly something you're not good at engaging with).
I think the vast majority of architectural production is indeed of the professional service type that you mentioned - the whole built environment is the work of professional architects doing, well, architecture work. Now there is a disappointing lack of coverage of academic work that could eventually improve or influence that kind of professional labor. Schools such as ETH and Stuttgart are working on construction techniques that may one work inform large scale construction (Way in the future) while material research groups at the GSD, Cornell, and MIT and parametric research at GSAPP and SUTD are also working directly with industry. But compared to, say, the engineering departments, such industry-tie ups are rare. One indirect result is the audacity of Autodesk - controller of the very tools of architectural production - slacking off Revit because architects are not able to craft their own digital design tools anymore. With the integration of Grasshopper into Revit and other BIM platforms - something students are embracing in certain campuses - this could be the start of designers regaining the initiative.
architects are always fighting over how much education should match professional work. Which is silly. And sad. At least we all get the inside joke when Sheldon says that Howard and his cohort are the oompa loopmas of science. Yes you read correctly, I am basically saying that practicing architects who dont do theory are oompah loompas, brilliant in their own way, but not leading the way forward the way academics are....
For those who can't detect brilliantly written sarcasm, the previous sentence was a wonderful example. Look, theory and practice are two sides of a 5 sided coin. There is lots of room for all kinds of thinking and we should be making room for even more of it now, not less. The world is becoming ever more complicated and even if this particular project doesn't solve something immediately important it absolutely is showing students, and hopefully our profession, that we should and can develop ways of acting as architects that go beyond the obvious material already out there. Lacking that mindset leaves us in entirely the wrong place to deal with the truly hard to grasp problems that we are going to face in the next decades...
this comment is an over-generalization and misses the point. of course there should be theory, i didn't say otherwise. but some theory is good and indeed pushes both the architecture conversation and others outside of it, and some is theory only exists for theory sake, aiming to please a very small audience, even within the discipline. an example of good theory in my mind is lebbeus woods' work, which "does not match professional work" but reached a broader audience, so much so that his work was "heavily borrowed" for a major movie.
well, your response was incredibly overgeneralized so I cant respond to the details of your discomfort with this project other than to say there is room or this work, and need for more rather than less. Its not a zero sum game. If you want more and better other kinds of theoretical work then I would invite you to take that on and show us how its done, or at least outline what is needed other than saying "Not this, lads, have another go!". I would look forward to reading or hearing what you have in mind. Not sure if this is small audience or not, but even if it is, why does that matter? Its one project...there are others. We can read those too.
all architectural built work is criticized, it's nothing new. if projects, including theoretical ones, are given a platform, they will inherently be both praised and criticized. and there's no requirement that one design or build something in order to have a critical eye towards buildings and architecture; in fact there is entire journalistic profession dedicated towards this pursuit. and the arts and design in general.
in terms of generalization, i was addressing your comment as the typical theory/practice binary, which really wasn't my point at all initially. sure there is room for this work, there is room for
anything, and nothing, but in my opinion there is already plenty of it and it's not really offering anything new. at the end of the day though i also see this forum as one in which people offer generalized comments to specific projects, not lengthy point-by-point articles. aka opinions.
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