Bryony Roberts Studio

Miller Prize Project
Exhibit Columbus
Columbus, Indiana
Opened August, 2019

Winner of Best Installation of 2019 from The Architect’s Newspaper

Soft Civic responds to the architecture of City Hall in Columbus, Indiana, and its symbolic role as the center of civic leadership in the community. Custom-fabricated structures with colorful woven surfaces activate the public spaces around the building’s main entrance as destinations for play, performance, and participation. Enhancing the existing activity at City Hall, the new structures host a series of community-driven events on the themes of democracy and leadership.

Addressing the monumental architecture of the City Hall building, the project turns its geometry into soft, pliable structures. The City Hall building, designed by Edward Charles Bassett of SOM in 1981, is a tight, geometric puzzle of circles and triangles organized along a monumental stair. This project echoes and breaks open the geometry of the building finding other circles and lines—through seating structures and platforms— that connect with the building and suggest different points of attention.

The softness of Soft Civic refers to the function of the space—a combination of relaxation and political participation—as well as its material quality. Constructed out of woven panels and steel frames, the new structures explore the softness of textiles at a monumental scale. Made through macramé knotting of nylon rope, the woven panels bring the textures of domestic space into the public sphere, encouraging playfulness and interaction at a site of governance. The red-orange color of the rope riffs on the brick of City Hall, transforming the colors of the building into a textile landscape. Created in collaboration with a textile workshop in Brooklyn, the knots of the weaving represent a communal effort and echo the project programming around collective participation.

Soft Civic invites a range of impromptu activities, such as lunchtime lounging, seating for performances, or political meetings, and also hosts a series of events created in partnership with community organizations. Bartholomew County Indivisible has organized multiple events around the theme of democracy, including a Celebrate Democracy day and Meet the Candidates event, and the Council for Youth Development is organizing a youth summit including musical performances.

Project Team: Sadie Dempsey and Michael Hoehn

Weaving: Powerhouse Arts, Brooklyn, NY

Steel Fabrication: Ignition Arts, Indianapolis, IN

Photography: Hadley Fruits

Press coverage
Design Milk, ArchDaily, Architect’s Newspaper, CityLab, Dwell, Wallpaper, Gray Magazine, Detail, The Republic 1/20/19, The Republic 1/8/19

Permanent Public Art Project
Winner of National Competition
Glass City Metropark, Toledo, OH
Opened Spring 2024

Transforming a former industrial site in East Toledo, Field of Histories offers a destination for exploring the histories of industry and labor in Toledo through an immersive public art piece that is integrated into the landscape of the Glass City Metropark.

Beginning with an in-depth community engagement process, the project celebrates untold stories of glass and other industries in Toledo as told by individuals who have lived and worked in the city. In a series of community workshops, individuals from Toledo brought objects that they felt are significant to local history and to cultural identity. Field of Histories includes 170 laser-engraved glass orbs that have in their center a 3d image of an object identified by a community member during the workshops. The project links to an online catalogue of all of the objects and their stories, as well as an interactive map.

Commissioned by: The Arts Commission of Toledo and Metroparks Toledo
BRS project team: Tung Nguyen
Fabricators: Versteeg Art Fabricators
Metal Spinning: Toledo Metal Spinning
Lighting Design: The Seed
Daylighting Consulting: Station 22
Engineering: Silman

Photos by Bryony Roberts, Aerial photo by Doug Hinebaugh

Press
Architect's Newspaper

With WIP Collaborative
Winner of Care for Hudson Square Competition
Hudson Square, New York City
Opened July 2021

Restorative Ground is a multifaceted landscape of choice, which draws from ongoing research by WIP Collaborative about creating inclusive and immersive public spaces. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, this research has highlighted the importance of providing a range of spatial qualities - high and low stimulation, tactile materials and textures, distinct experiential zones - so that people can find a space that suits their preferences. The installation offers a dynamic platform for public life to re-emerge in Hudson Square; a place for individual and collective engagement, recreation, and healing. The project won the Care for Hudson Square competition organized by the Urban Design Forum, Hudson Square Properties, and the Hudson Square BID to support the neighborhood of Hudson Square in lower Manhattan in the aftermath of the pandemic.

WIP Collaborative:
The WIP Collaborative team is composed of seven independent designers and their respective practices including Abby Coover (Overlay Office), Bryony Roberts (Bryony Roberts Studio), Elsa Ponce, Lindsay Harkema (WIP Studio), Ryan Brooke Thomas (Kalos Eidos), Sera Ghadaki, and Sonya Gimon.

Press:
Curbed, Fast Company, CityLab, Madame Architect, Architects Newspaper

High Museum of Art
Atlanta, Georgia
Piazza Activation
Opened July, 2021

Outside the Lines is an immersive maze of sensory environments. The project emerged from conversations between Bryony Roberts Studio and self-advocates with disabilities and their allies throughout Atlanta, with the goal of creating a space that celebrates a range of sensory experiences.

Tactile materials with varied textures invite exploratory navigation, discovery, and play. The gently curving steel structure supports thousands of hanging strands along the rise and fall of the frame. The forest-like atmosphere was designed in collaboration with individuals who are blind and visually impaired to invite dynamic navigation through touch. The variety and height of the materials provide a spectrum of experience within reach of everyone, and produce a range of intensity and stimulation, offering choice for neurodiverse people with sensory sensitivities. The structure forms small enclosures with nets for quiet relaxation, as well as open environments with platforms for active exploration and social play.

Community Partners:
Greg Aikens, BEGIN Program Manager, Center for the Visually Impaired
Shelby Ball, STARS Program Manager, Center for the Visually Impaired
Victoria Dugger, Artist
Lindsay Flax, Advocate
Paula E. Forney, MMSc, RPT
Dr. Madeleine Hackney, Associate Professor, Emory University School of Medicine
Eric Jacobson, Executive Director, Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities
Dr. Cheryl Kaiman, Program Director, Marcus Autism Center
Sitara Nayak, Vice President of Programs, Parent to Parent of Georgia
Mitzi Proffitt, Director of Support Services, Parent to Parent of Georgia

Fabrication: ALTBLD
Photography: Jonathan Hillyer

Press
Metropolis, Interior Design, WABE,Architect Magazine, Surface Magazine

Awards
Best Temporary Installation 2021: Honorable Mention, Architect’s Newspaper

Bryony Roberts + Mabel O. Wilson +
the Marching Cobras of New York
Commissioned by Storefront for Art and Architecture
2017-2018

Presented by Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Marcus Garvey Park Alliance, and Performa 17
Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council

Commissioned by Storefront for Art and Architecture, Bryony Roberts and Mabel O. Wilson created a research project, performance, and exhibition that explored the crucial role of marching performance as both cultural expression and political resistance. The project was inaugurated with a series of performances that interwove echoes of the 1917 Silent March against racial violence with references to the revered Harlem Hellfighters. These performances were developed in collaboration with the Marching Cobras of New York, a Harlem-based after-school drumline and dance team, and presented in partnership with the Marcus Garvey Park Alliance as part of Performa 17.

Historically rooted in military training exercises and combat formations, African-American marching bands and drumlines honored service in U.S. conflicts and highlighted the absence of civil rights despite sacrifices to defend the nation. While their movements, costumes, colors, and iconography have radically expanded since the nineteenth century to incorporate other forms of performance including dance lines, hip-hop, and step choreography, they still remain connected to a lineage of marching as political expression.

For the exhibition, Bryony Roberts and Mabel O. Wilson combine the many layers of the research and performance project into a spatial installation. Continuing and expanding upon the theme of camouflage, the exhibition displays volumes of custom-printed fabric in hybridized patterns. In part, marching bands served as a form of camouflage that enabled African-Americans to gather and occupy public spaces when otherwise prohibited during the era of Jim Crow segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In response, the exhibition's patterned textiles merge military camouflage with the geometric paving patterns of Marcus Garvey Park, the site of the inaugural Marching On performances. Changing color along the length of the gallery, the fabric creates pockets of space for thematic topics related to the history of race and urban public space.

Marching On ultimately celebrates historical and contemporary forms of marching by revealing on the power of this type of movement to articulate cultural heritage in moments of rapid change.

Digital collages by Bryony Roberts
Videos by Ferran de Mendoza
Photography of performance by Jenica Heintzelman
Photography of exhibition by Miguel de Guzman and Spencer Kohn

Related Texts
Bryony Roberts for Harvard Design Magazine

Press Coverage
Domus, Curbed, Esse, New York Times, Artnet

Project Links
Storefront for Art and Architecture
Performa 2017
Graham Foundation

Site-specific Installation
Lincoln Center, New York
Opening Fall 2022

Commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Big Umbrella Festival, which centers young audiences with autism and other developmental disabilities, Softy transforms the main plaza into a soft and interactive environment. Responding to the central fountain and circular lines of the plaza, the project introduces colorful outdoor cushions that radiate out from the center. The radial organization of cushions creates a range of social and sensory conditions, with concentrated areas for play and socializing around the fountain and more private areas around the edges for restorative moments. The smaller cushions can be moved around to create social clusters or quiet areas away from a crowd. The softness of the cushions offers the chance to find soothing relaxation even in a large public space. Softy responds to the forms of Lincoln Center but introduces unexpected possibilities for movement, sensory experience, and social interaction in this monumental plaza.

The cushions are created with recycled foam, and planned to be donated to donated to neighboring facilities after the project.

Project team: Tung Nguyen
Photography: Michael Vahrenwald

Press
Curbed

With Abriannah Aiken
Research project and online platform

Click here for a full-resolution version of Part 1

Feminist Spatial Practices is a multi-part visual mapping project and online platform to amplify feminist spatial practices and build community among feminist practitioners around the world.

Part 1 is a visual diagram commissioned by e-flux and the Jencks Foundation that celebrates the wide range of contemporary feminist spatial practices and points to specific ways in which feminist practices are expanding the fields of the built environment. Feminism is often considered just an issue of representation – a numbers game of adding more women, nonbinary, or trans folx to faculty, boards, or offices. Instead, we’re exploring how feminist spatial practices around the world introduce expanded ways of knowing and making that enable more just and equitable futures. While it is impossible to depict the full range of global practices in one drawing, this diagram offers one vantage point onto the undulating terrain of interconnected feminist practices. Part 1 grew from dialogue with many voices and, through its incompleteness, points to future iterations and participatory formats. The diagram celebrates practices in six realms: Experimental Pedagogies, Expanded Histories, Embodied Theories, Collaborative Practices, Spaces for Non-Conforming Bodies, and Alternative Materialities. These modes of practice emerge in relation to activist movements and political conflicts around the world, depicted here as a diagonal axis of ongoing political struggles.

Part 2 is an ongoing, global collaboration to develop an open-source online resource and community celebrating feminist spatial practices. More information about the global Feminist Spatial Practices project here.

We are grateful to Kadambari Baxi, Virginia Black, Lori Brown, S. E. Eisterer, Ruo Jia, Jerome Haferd, Lindsay Harkema, Elke Krasny, Korantemaa Larbi, Ana María León, Ishita Shah, Anooradha Siddiqi, Tijana Vujosevic, Alla Vronskaya, Sumayya Vally, and Mimi Zeiger for their thoughtful suggestions and feedback on this project.

Installation
Architectural Association
Fall 2023

This installation grew from the research and visualization project Feminist Spatial Practices Part 1, commissioned by e-flux and the Jencks Foundation. Abriannah Aiken and Bryony Roberts were invited to share their work on at the Chronograms exhibition and symposium at the Architectural Association in London, organized by e-flux and the Jencks Foundation. Together with Tung Nguyen, they designed a floor installation with "fluffies" that translated the landscape of the visualization into tactile textiles that invited interaction and dialogue with the diagram. The fluffies prompt lounging, playing, and interacting in the gallery space, and reference lineages of feminist and queer textile art.

Fabrication: Tung Nguyen

With WIP Collaborative
Commissioned by the Shed, New York City
Summer 2022

Tidal Shift is a site-specific installation at the Shed that activates the plaza for summertime programming. Tidal Shift responds to the angular geometry of the Shed’s facade and offers sculptural platforms for sitting, lounging, performing, and gathering. In contrast to the monumental towers and vast public spaces of Hudson Yards, the project supports the scale of human bodies through inclined planes and stepped surfaces that invite play, rest, and social connection. This project continues the work of WIP Collaborative, a shared feminist practice of independent designers, which creates spaces for embodied experiences in the public realm.

Tidal Shift’s family of sculptural shapes supports both everyday relaxing and a range of summertime programming from the Shed, enabling multiple configurations for performances, dance parties, and events. The blue-green colors and undulating forms of the project are celebrations of movement and action on the plaza, as well as expressions of solidarity with the “Green Wave” of feminist activism that has gained global momentum with recent hard-fought victories for women’s healthcare rights in South and Central America. Through its forms, colors, and responses to context, the project calls for a tidal shift in the liberation and care for diverse embodied experiences.

Fabrication: Konduit NYC
Photography: Michael Vahrenwald and WIP Collaborative

WIP Collaborative:

The WIP Collaborative team is composed of seven independent designers and their respective practices including Abby Coover (Overlay Office), Bryony Roberts (Bryony Roberts Studio), Elsa Ponce, Lindsay Harkema (WIP Studio), Ryan Brooke Thomas (Kalos Eidos), Sera Ghadaki, and Sonya Gimon.

Collaboration with SO-IL 

Exhibition Design for Global Grad Show
Dubai Design Week, Dubai, UAE
2018

In the spirit of artificial worlds in Dubai--from Dubai World to the indoor ski slopes--this project produces an immersive and imaginative environment for the Global Grad Show in Dubai Design Week 2018. The project builds on SO-IL and Bryony Roberts Studio’s shared fascination with softness and textiles, creating an exhibition environment through the variation and volumetric manipulation of fabric. The installation is created with 28,000 square feet of fabric, painted by the theatrical set painters of Atomic Design, through splattering, spilling, and pooling paint. The playful use of pigment resonates with the creativity of the student work on display and takes the visitors into a zone of discovery and new possibilities. Playing with the artificiality of design in Dubai, the project creates a landscape alien to the desert context, while also folding itself back into global cycles of reuse. After the exhibition, the fabric will be reused as shading for a free school in the Philippines, thereby avoiding the level of waste typical for exhibitions. 

Fabric painting by Atomic Design
Sewing by Rosebrand
All drawings by Bryony Roberts Studio and SO-IL
Photography by Marta Lamovsek

with Agency Landscape + Planning and Gresham Smith
and consultants Colloqate, Dix.Hite, and HR&A
Second place in invited competition, 2021
Jacksonville, Florida

On an interdisciplinary team lead by Agency Landscape + Planning, Bryony Roberts Studio developed the design for the public art component: three large shade canopies for a permanent park in Jacksonville, Florida. Emerging from an extensive community engagement process led by Colloqate, the design of the park and canopies responded to the desires of Jacksonville residents to see varied, inviting, interactive, and affordable riverfront experiences.

Echoing the dynamic St. Johns river in Jacksonville, the shade canopies evoke the colors and movement of water. Steel frames support rippling polycarbonate mesh that reflects the light into constantly shifting shade patterns below. Each canopy frames a different destination within the park, from the eating and play spaces of the Oak Deck, to the water play area of the Oxbow Fountain, to the high-end dining spaces on the Bridge Deck, bringing much-needed shade and visual excitement to this public space.

Press:
News 4 Jax, The Florida Times-Union

Bryony Roberts + South Shore Drill Team
Performance at the Federal Center, Chicago
Chicago Architecture Biennial
October 2-3, 2015

Conceived for the Chicago Architecture Biennial, this collaborative performance was created by designer Bryony Roberts and choreographer Asher Waldron of the South Shore Drill Team. Mies van der Rohe’s Federal Center in Chicago is a monument of modern architecture and national government, unified by a relentless and ever-present grid. It was initiated by Mayor Richard Daley in the late 1950s, at a time of great investment in the downtown Loop, and disinvestment in the predominantly African-American South Side of Chicago. Responding to both the architectural space and its larger social history, this project introduces a dynamic performance by the South Shore Drill Team, a youth organization from the South Side. Merging military drill routines with hip-hop choreography, the group transforms the lines of the Miesian grid into an electrifying system of movement. Their transformation challenges the current militarization of public space and the longstanding segregation of urban space in Chicago. 

Photography by Andrew Bruah
Video by Andy Resek of Winterbeach Productions

Press Coverage
LA Times, Archinect, Architectural Record, Architects Newspaper - Mimi Zeiger,Architects Newspaper - Aaron Betsky, KCRW DnA

Site-specific Installation
Neutra VDL House, Los Angeles
Supported by the Graham Foundation
July 13 - September 7, 2013

Inverting Neutra is an installation at Richard and Dion Neutra’s VDL House II (1932/1966) in Los Angeles that transforms the modern house by introducing dynamic, interactive fields of hanging fibers. The VDL House is known for its close interlocking of interior and exterior spaces, in which exterior patios penetrate the house from the street up to the roof terrace. This project performs an inversion by turning the void spaces into distinct colored volumes, filled with hanging blue cords following the spacing of the stair module. Turning voids into volumes of color, this inversion both celebrates and subverts the existing architecture. The hanging cords move in the wind and in response to touch, creating a register of climate and movement through the house. In addition, the blue cords are cut to follow the contours of human movement, for example, dropping lower in a seating area and lifting up above the main stair. The result is an interactive and dynamic installation that calls attention to the constantly shifting environmental and social activity in the house. 

Rather than critiquing Neutra or his architecture, the project serves as a provocation to the schism between preservation and architecture practices, siting creativity in the transformation of existing structures. The project hosted a discussion on alternative preservation practices, including Barbara Lamprecht,  Kimberli Meyer, Todd Gannon, Dora Epstein Jones, and Sarah Lorenzen.

Photography by Jaime Kowal

Press Coverage
Domus, Wallpaper Magazine

Project Links
Neutra VDL House project page, Graham Foundation project page

Bryony Roberts + Melissa Lohman
Site-specific performance
Piazza del Campidoglio, Rome
Supported by the American Academy in Rome
June 16, 2016

A collaboration between Bryony Roberts and dancer/choreographer Melissa Lohman, this project stages an encounter between contemporary performers and the monumental space of the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome. Famously redesigned by Michelangelo in the 16th century, the space features a central oval ground with a spiraling pattern, which was later realized by Mussolini. As the seat of the municipal government in Rome, the architecture and plaza of the Campidoglio has been carefully constructed to represent a center of local power that points towards the Vatican. 

The dancers alternately trace and deviate from the patterned ground, responding to both the centralizing and decentralizing elements of the space. Measuring the space with their bodies and with long white rods, the dancers turn a dutiful study of the pattern into a more varied confrontation with its constraints. 

Dancers: Chiara Casciani, Maria Elena Curzi, Silvia Franci, Lucrezia Micheli, and Chiara Pacioni
Percussionist: Angela Naccari
Video editing: Jamie Lansdowne
Video camera operators: Clarissa Cappellani and Raffaella Antonutti
Photography: Claudia Pajewski, Antonio Convista, and Javier Galindo

Site-specific Installation
The American Academy in Rome
Cinque Mostre Exhibition
February-May, 2016

Primo Piano responds to the unique stone floor of the American Academy in Rome entryway as well as the surrounding tradition of patterned stone floors in Rome. Built in 1914, the entryway floor of this McKim Mean & White building is a modest, neo-Renaissance pattern of travertine circles and diamonds inlaid into peperino stone. But in the vicinity are examples of medieval Cosmatesque floors, with intricate patterns of circles, triangles, and squares, which were used to guide the positions of clergy and worshippers during religious celebrations. The new pattern of Primo Piano, made with adhesive vinyl shapes, creates a visual oscillation between the existing floor at the American Academy and references to the surrounding Cosmatesque precedents. Disrupting the existing axial, symmetry organization of the entryway, this pattern introduces alternative directions for movement and attention in the space, which emerge from the existing geometry and also defy it. 
 

Press Coverage
Artforum, Architects Newspaper

Collaboration with landscape architect Colleen Tuite
Salut Paris competition
Second Place
June 2020

The Community Platform creates public space by bridging the abandoned train tracks of the Petite Ceinture in Paris. In the northern periphery, La Recyclerie exists at the threshold between gentrifying neighborhoods and public housing projects. Already a site of reuse and a destination for social gathering, the site has the potential to be an even more inclusive bridge between communities. To this end, the project connects both sides of the tracks to create a shared space in between. Market stalls run along the lengths of the existing platforms. In between, the community bridge offers space for performances and lounging interspersed with landscaping around exposed tracks. Above the platform, a lightweight roof canopy spans the public space, unifying the two sides and offering shelter from the elements.

In order to create a flexible, cost effective framework for public space, the project makes use of modular, off-the-shelf components that are frequently used in outdoor spaces, such as scaffolding and outdoor performance platforms. While designed specifically for the site at La Recyclerie, this approach could be easily adapted to other locations along the former rail lines and extended to cover a larger area.

Solo exhibition and research project
Texas State Galleries
San Marcos, TX
Exhibition: March-April, 2019
Research: 2018-ongoing

Strong as an acre of garlic is an immersive installation that reflects on the lives of women ranchers in Texas. Based on the experiences of women running small family-run ranches and larger multi-state companies, the exhibition points to the shifting nature of the cattle industry. Foregrounding the multifaceted expertise required to run a ranch, the project highlights daily processes of navigating global economics, breeding genetics, land management, and veterinary science. Audio interviews with ranchers explore the strength required to run a business, to care for cattle, and to confront gender expectations. Moving beyond stereotypes, this project looks instead at the complex interactions between global and local forces, human and nonhuman beings, and expectations and realities of gender experiences. Roberts has gathered material for the exhibition through interviews, ranch visits, and historical research.

Inspired by these observations, Roberts has designed a multifaceted landscape of textiles and wooden structures that reference ranch houses and cattle pens. The structures contain information representing the daily lives of the four women ranchers interviewed for the project — Missy Bonds, Linda Galayda, Kimberly Ratcliff, and Kelley Sullivan — as well as audio recordings of the women talking about their working processes and experiences. The landscape is created with hand-painted fabric that merges the textures of cowhide and soil.

Painting team: Monica Mohnot, Alexis Rincon, Riley Taber, and Miranda Terry
Installation team: Eric Acuña, Glenn Edinburgh, Rebecca Marino, Gino “Puffy” Mindiola, and Marissa Servantez

Photography by Anthony Cross

Press:
University Star

Commissioned for “Soft Schindler” Exhibition
Curated by Mimi Zeiger
MAK Center, Los Angeles
October 2019-January 2020

Felty is a series of large, oblong shapes for holding and squeezing. Made of layers of felt and knotted rope dipped in paint, these masses evoke bodily forms with oblique strangeness. In a color palette of orange, red, and brown, the contrast between inside and outside roughly suggests skin versus organs. Displayed on a loose pile on the floor and intended to be felt up, these pieces prompt experiences of intimacy and tactility. Learning from the history of feminist and queer textile artists, the project joins a long line of artists who use textiles to produce softness, droopiness, formlessness, and abjection in a gallery space. Resisting definition or prescribed use, the pieces instead demand viewers to invent their interaction with the pieces, following desire for touch and embrace. Within the domestic space of the Schindler House, the piece summons the kind of personal and intimate experiences that are typically excluded from expertise in the realms of high art and architecture.

Project team: Sadie Dempsey
Materials donation from Filz Felt

Press
Pin-Up Magazine, The Architect’s Newspaper, Architectural Digest

Solo exhibition
Pinkcomma Gallery
49 Waltham Street, Boston
September 6 - October 14, 2016
 

Tailored is a collection of shapes that interlock with human bodies. Fitting closely around shoulders, chests, and hips, the objects offer intimate contact on a level not usually found in furniture or architecture.

This exhibition builds on Bryony Roberts’ ongoing work with pre-existing buildings, in which she measures and extends the idiosyncrasies of historic architecture. Her work focuses on specificity rather than generality—how the details of an existing condition can be generative, rather than the imposition of an external system.

In Tailored, the pre-existing condition is human bodies, each defined by individual shapes and sizes. While each piece in the show is tailored to a different person, the project produces surprising commonalities in proportion and dimension between people of different genders and sizes—generating an ambiguity between the specific and the general. The abstraction and ambiguity of the shapes produces an open playfulness as people find their own configurations of interlocking.  

Assistants: Andrew Brookes, Zhuang Guo, Caleb Hawkins, Chris Mollica, Brian Park, Huopu Zhang
Materials generously donated by Filz Felt

Proposal for PS1 Young Architects Program
PS1 Moma, New York
2018

Soft Spot builds on the lineage of feminist textile art to produce a collective, interactive environment. Rejecting singular authorship, the project offers a field of elements to be woven, braided, knotted, and piled by visitors as well as by specific artists invited to remake the space throughout the duration of the summer.

A grid of fixed steel cables is tensioned between the concrete walls of the PS1 courtyard, forming an architectural-scale loom. Tubes of flexible, translucent fabric, stuffed with textile waste, are attached to this grid to form horizontal awnings and vertical partitions. Responding to the excesses of textile waste in the U.S.—now at 21 billion pounds of post-consumer textile waste per year—the project includes tubes stuffed with post-consumer textiles. The stuffed tubes produce soft, plush elements for seating and shading, with the colors and patterns of the fabric bringing visual richness and greater awareness of this cycle of waste.

Traveling Exhibition
Co-curated with Lori Brown and Lindsay Harkema
Exhibition Design by Sadie Imae and Natalya Dikhanov
With work by students from Columbia GSAPP, Syracuse University, and City College New York
Opening at Center for Architecture, NY in May 2024

Reproductive Justice has been defined by advocacy organization SisterSong as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” This collaboration between architectural educators addresses reproductive justice at a time when reproductive and sexual freedoms are under fierce attack in the United States. Since the Supreme Court ruling Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization of June 24, 2022 ended federal protection for abortion access and gave state governments control of reproductive rights, more than half of U.S. states have severely restricted the rights of cis, nonbinary, and trans people to shape their reproductive and sexual futures. These restrictions compound existing barriers for low-income communities and people of color to have bodily autonomy.

What can architects do in response to these complex social and political conditions? A collaboration between architectural educators at different institutions is gathering knowledge about the role of architecture in reproductive health care and developing design proposals for alternative social and architectural models of care, to be disseminated through a traveling exhibition and public platform. The participating educators are Bryony Roberts at Columbia GSAPP, Lori Brown at Syracuse University, and Lindsay Harkema at City College New York, in collaboration with Sadie Imae and Natalya Dikhanov of FLUFFFF Studio. To expand knowledge about architecture’s role in reproductive health care, their parallel courses learn from discourses of reproductive justice, which frame reproductive rights as entangled with social, economic, and political inequities.

Bryony Roberts’ studio also learns from discourses of radical care to explore mutually supportive social systems and the experimental architectures that can support them. Intentionally multiscalar, the studio considers the relationships between systems and bodies, exploring how systems of regulation impact the embodied experiences of individuals in spaces of health care. Students will be encouraged to think through the relationships between systems, buildings, and bodies, combining analytical skills with tactile material experimentation.

Press
Architect’s Newspaper, New York Review of Architecture, Ms. Magazine
Support
Graham Foundation

Community Engagement and Programming
Conservation Management Plan
Supported by Getty Foundation Keeping It Modern
Team led by Prudon & Partners
2020

The North Christian Church in Columbus, Indiana, designed by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1964, is a modernist landmark in which architectural and social history are closely intertwined. The expressionistic form of the church, with a large spire rising over a centralized, octagonal sanctuary, not only exemplified Saarinen’s late work with concrete but also materialized the nonhierarchical organization of denomination Disciples of Christ. Since its founding, the church has prioritized social justice and gender equality, and in the last decade has become a leader in supporting LGBTQ members and their communities.

Funded by the Getty Foundation’s Keeping It Modern Grant, a team led by Prudon & Partners is developing a Conservation Management Plan to sustain the building and its community. Bryony Roberts Studio is leading the sociocultural analysis and community engagement aspect of this project, gathering research on the social history of the site through interviews and archival research and facilitating community workshops to develop possibilities for future programming and activation. This work aims to celebrate the important history of this unique institution and develop programmatic, economic, and spatial strategies for sustaining its significance into the future.

Site-specific installation
Orange County Museum of Art, CA
Cal-Pac Triennial 2017
May 6 - September 3, 2017

Imprint is a cast of the Brutalist concrete facade of the Orange County Museum of Art. The piece was commissioned for the OCMA California-Pacific Triennial, intended to be the last show in the building before its demolition. The goal of the project is to document and reproduce the building as a record, but also to produce a transformation of the familiar facade. This large-scale fiberglass cast is an exact copy of the existing walls, down to every bump and pebble in the concrete. Mounted in the front windows of the musuem, the piece creates sculptural continuity with the surrounding facade, but noticeable material discontinuity. Backlit in the window, the cast is an ethereal, translucent surface. This highlights the artificiality of the representation and its difference from the original. Rather than aiming for objectivity, this copy acknowledges its own artificiality and the corporeal dimension of its construction. Installed facing the lobby, the texture of the brutalist facade becomes a sensuous surface that visitors are invited to touch. 

Photography by Jaime Kowal, Bryony Roberts
Fabrication by ADM Works

Press Coverage
KCET - Susan Morgan

Invited Masterplan
Government Quarter, Oslo, Norway
Spring, 2015

Bryony Roberts led the Oslo School of Architecture (AHO) team to produce an invited masterplan for the government district in Oslo. The masterplan addresses the transformation of postwar modernist buildings by Erling Viksjø that were bombed on July 22 2011 by Anders Breivik. The AHO Team submitted alongside other invited teams such as BIG, Snøhetta, and MVRDV, and offered the perspective of experimental preservation. The AHO Team project most actively questioned the government plans for the site and advocated for the preservation of the existing buildings. As a result, it garnered massive support from the general public and architecture community, and took first place in the NRK national poll.

This project identifies the existing condition as a "monumental field," in which buildings from multiple time periods and architectural styles represent aspects of Norwegian society. "Open Quarter" extends the underlying grids of this monumental field to structure a thickened ground plane and the placement of new towers, which must accommodate over 2 million square feet of new office space.

Team
Advisers: Jorge Otero-Pailos, Erik Langdalen, Christian Parreno, Guttorm Ruud
Graduate Students: Helle Bendixen, Nina Gjersøe, Liv Hanstad, Hauk Lien, Eva Negård, Ida Nordstrøm, Liv Oppenbøen, Rebecca Schulz
With assistance from Craig Konyk's students at Columbia GSAPP

Press Coverage
Arkitektnytt, Aftenposten, NRK poll, Radikal Portal

Architectural League Prize Exhibition 2018
Site-specific installation
Parsons Gallery, New York
June - August, 2018

Bryony Roberts Studio, a winner of the 2018 Architectural League Prize, created new site­-specific installation for "Objective," an exhibition featuring work from the 2018 League Prize winners at the Aronson Galleries at Parsons School of Design in New York. The installation is an exuberant graphic pattern of faux stone that emerges from the hexagonal grid of the gallery floor. The project is an extension of Marbles, Roberts’ studies of medieval geometry and stonework begun at the American Academy in Rome, where she was a Rome Prize Fellow from 2015­-16. In addition to the vinyl wall and floor graphic, the installation features a custom table that displays portfolios of past projects. The table is constructed with mitered birch plywood and mounted on welded steel legs that align precisely with the graphic pattern on both the wall and floor.

Assistance from Sadie Dempsey

Video
Hunter Douglas video

Press Coverage
Surface Magazine, Archinect, Metropolis, Architects Newspaper, Bustler

Related Websites
Architectural League Interview

Collage Studies
2016-2017

These studies are inspired by patterned stone floors in Rome, in which precious stones are cut and inlaid into intricate geometric patterns. In particular, the project looks at the medieval Cosmatesque floors seen throughout central Italy, in which simple geometric forms - squares, diamonds, and circles - accumulate into complex fields of texture through the combination of different marbles. 

These collages explore how complexity can emerge from material difference within simple geometric patterns. The studies are both drawings and designs for future installations. As architectural drawings, they experiment with representing space not through line but through only the juxtaposition of color and texture. 

Site-specific Installation
The American Academy in Rome
July 2017

This installation grew from a study of the medieval Cosmatesque floors in Rome, dating from the late 12th- and early 13th-centuries. In churches such as San Clemente, San Crisogono, and Santa Maria in Cosmedin, medieval craftsmen used small, found pieces of marble and precious stones to create intricately patterned floors. Although the geometries were simple—squares, circles, and triangles—the variations of color and veining in each piece stone create complex fields of pattern and color.

Inspired by these floors, Pavimento is a contemporary spin on the Cosmatesque techniques. Again, the geometries are simple, but the material variations introduce optical tricks and unforeseen complexities. Rather than using found marble, this project uses faux-marble contact paper found at hardware stores around Rome. The fanaticism for marble ornament continues into the present day in Rome, but now in plastic adhesive form, and this project takes advantage of its availability. In addition, the project is site-specific—responding to the terra-cotta floors of the underground Cryptoporticus at the American Academy in Rome. Medieval patterns are stretched and aligned to the grid of terra-cotta tiles, moving in and out of alignment with the underlying grid.

Assistant: Roberto de Crecchio 

One Prize Competition
2014

Responding to the architecture of Building 128 in the Brooklyn Navy Yards and the need for a flexible learning space, Central Dock offsets the shape of the gable roof to activate the vertical section of the building. Like a ship docking in the center of the building, the Central Dock acts as a hub for surrounding occupants, concentrating shared programming of exhibition, cafe, and screening spaces.

With assistance from Connor Gravelle and Carolina Murcia

Cityvision New York Competition
Honorable Mention
2013

Open Zones offers a horizontal framework for stitching together historic landmarks, public space, and new development across Manhattan. This strategy reconciles the otherwise incompatible agendas that have guided New York City planning over the last hundred years: the modernist ideal of open public space, the preservation of historic architecture, and the recent turn toward sustainable densification.

Exposing the structural frames of existing and new architecture, Open Zones reveals an open field that enables connections across disparate units through expansive, luminous public space. Challenging the characteristic verticality of Manhattan, the horizontality of each zone generates new part-to-whole relationships between former icons and the public zone. Each building is simultaneously part of a field and an individual monument. 

Studies with dancer Melissa Lohman
The American Academy in Rome
Spring 2016

These wearable props join together bodies and buildings. Acting like prosthetics, the objects fit precisely between part of a body and part of a structure. They are two-sided objects, with one side fitting into corners and edges of buildings and the other side fitting around human bodies. A materialization of the negative space between bodies and structures, they also augment experiences of sitting and leaning. They have multiple uses and configurations, but always produce an interdependency between the user and the surrounding architecture. 

Experiments conducted at the American Academy in Rome by Bryony Roberts and in public spaces in Rome with dancer Melissa Lohman.

Site-specific performance
Inner City Arts, Los Angeles
For LA Forum's ForumFest, 2013

For this live intervention, performers wear geometric shapes that fit precisely into the negative spaces of Michael Maltzan's Inner City Arts complex. Shaped by the angular lines of the existing architecture, the shapes slot into corners and recombine to form different additions to the buildings. In contrast to a static installation, the performance creates an interlocking of the human body, prosthetic shapes, and existing architecture.

Site-specific installation
Brooklyn, New York
2006

This site-specific installation explores how the insertion of a new figure can interlock with an existing space to transform its perceptual and programmatic conditions. The project raises the datum of a bathroom floor and wraps the new elevated floor surface around all of the existing furniture and bathroom fixtures. The new datum makes the existing objects appear to rise out of a larger volume, but also maintains the original function of the bathroom. The figure both asserts a new whole and leaves the existing objects intact. 
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