Lecture: French 2D, “Creatures, Comfort, Collectives”
Respondent: Paul Andersen
Thursday, February 16, 5pm
1100 Architecture + Design Studios
Join us for the first lecture of the Spring semester, by the Boston-based practice French 2D. Clinical Associate Professor Paul Andersen will respond and lead a public conversation.
French 2D is an architecture studio founded by Jenny French and Anda French. The award-winning practice works on mixed-use projects combining ideas of collectivity with more radical organizations and types. Their work centers collaboration across multiple scales, including participatory events and installations, urban-scale textiles, and buildings for collective living. French 2D’s housing work focuses on uncommon housing types, found in their cohousing, compact living, and adaptive reuse projects. The practice also works on civic installations and exhibitions that call upon the domestic to bring people together for familiar rituals in unfamiliar spaces, found in furniture, textiles, and environments.
French 2D won a 2020 P/A Award from Architect magazine and Design Vanguard award from Architectural Record in 2019. The firm has been featured in Domus, Metropolis, the Architect’s Newspaper, and as Architect magazine’s Next Progressives. French 2D’s work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and most recently in the solo show House Clothes at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Anda French (MArch Princeton, BA Barnard College) is visiting lecturer at the Princeton University School of Architecture and is President Emeritus of the Boston Society of Architects/AIA.
Jenny French (MArch Harvard GSD, BA Dartmouth College) is assistant professor in the practice of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
The UIC School of Architecture lecture series is free and open to the public.