The Brooklyn Rail

Tei Carpenter is a New York City-based architect and practitioner, trained in philosophy and design. She is the founder and director of Agency—Agency, a studio specializing in cultural, residential, civic, and public projects at multiple scales. She has lectured internationally and taught at a number of institutions. This conversation is a gathering of reflections on Carpenter’s past projects, from their design and construction through to their afterlives.

Ayesha Ghosh (Rail): This year marks the ten year anniversary of your work with the Big Brothers Big Sisters headquarters in Houston. Can you talk about the project and its impact on you?

Tei Carpenter: Between then and now, the practice has had to be nimble as it relates to place and time. That project was important becauseBig Brothers Big Sisters is an organization that’s founded on mentorship, so I aligned with its mission and values. That’s something that has stuck with me, a values-based way of approaching projects as much as possible, to think about how architecture can play a role in that. It wasn’t just about the building, it was also about how the building had to perform for the organization and its needs.

Rail: I feel like talking about vision and efficiency is relevant for that project, especially as it occurred early in your career. The building has amazing views into the space from the street, and it’s still being used for all types of events. It’s not just an office space. There’s a built-in spatial inefficiency that makes it socially and culturally more useful.

Carpenter: Officially, the program is an office for the headquarters in Houston. We tried to figure out how to expand that idea of the “office” in a couple of different ways. One was to have an entry threshold that could be a public space with an exhibition component. Then, the cafe was designed to be public so people can come in off the road, grab coffee, hang out, and meet informally. The offices are on the second floor, and the third is more of an event space, for mentors and mentees to meet. The local TV station filmed their morning talk show there, with the background of Houston. There were proms there! There’s a flexibility that had to be built into what the office could be, or needed to be at that point. You try to design something with the idea that it’s an office, but actually it’s an expanded idea of what that can be as you work together with people from the city.

Rail: It’s like setting up a stage for relationships.

Carpenter: To some extent, we did think about the building as a billboard, or a space that you could read from the highway or the street. You could come in and participate in it. The idea of the stage is a really nice one, something that can be a platform for relationships to be cultivated and take place within a space.

Rail: I want to double back to you saying you had to be pretty nimble in your own practice, and pull this quote from a few years ago where you call to “radically transform and redesign the role … of the architect” (a+u, 2020). Your approach to design, practice, and architecture is itself a work in progress. Can you expand how your own office, your own way of practicing, is a testing ground for redefining and restructuring the role of the architect?

Carpenter: I think that it’s trying to test out different formats for how practice can be approached. In the studio, there’s a more traditional client-based model. Questioning the role of the architect is tied up in what kind of projects you are working on. Is your client a collaborator? Are you finding your own client? Are you being more entrepreneurial to find the kind of work that you want to do? And then one can also try to get grants and piece things together to make certain kinds of work happen. The question of the role of the architect requires rethinking the client and rethinking what kind of service-based model supports architecture. The studio is a work in progress. One is designing the practice itself, and that’s an ongoing project.

Rail: You’re doing simultaneous trial and error. And I really appreciate that you are pursuing and giving focus to a traditional model. All of the alternative experiments that you’re doing can, in an informed way, impact traditional models.

Carpenter: You learn a lot from a traditional model, and I think there’s a huge amount of value in that. Clients are active collaborators. I don’t think that there’s necessarily a hierarchy of work in the office. It’s more that different types of projects exist together and they’re running in parallel, which can sometimes mean there’s a lot going on. I personally thrive on that.

Rail: One of the recent clients that you had was kind of interesting—the Carnegie Museum of Art, for whom you did exhibition design. You had the museum, curators, the public, the artists, yourself. There were a lot of agents involved—and this is not your only exhibition work. How is that for you, working in the exhibition realm?

Carpenter: That project for the Carnegie International was really special. On the one hand, it was working with the chief curator Sohrab Mohebbi and the Carnegie Museum of Art, while certain other areas were curated by artists and collectives. I was able to work with a collective from Indonesia called Hyphen— on their part of the show about the painter Kustiyah. Theirs was a show within the show. The exhibition design was an overall identity that had to be designed along with the display elements and furniture. It didn’t include any walls, but instead used a combination of chainmail mesh and sheer fabric curtains to create soft volumes within the gallery spaces to support curatorial thematics, for example art’s role as a form of solidarity amidst conflict and occupation. Without creating boundaries, the design was meant to reinforce different perspectives without establishing a singular view and create a dialogue between the polyphony of voices and artworks.

It was also an exercise in reuse, since we took all the material from that exhibition and have been able to bring it to other places: to donate it or give it to different artists and nonprofit groups. There was a second life that was designed into the exhibition. That freedom and the support to see it through from the museum was really important.

Rail: That’s amazing. It’s nice to hear that there’s a second life. The materiality of that show was really special in that it had weight, but it still had lightness and softness.

Speaking about materials, this is a really good transition into the role of water in your work. I would say your projects are very magnetized towards a creative use of water. And, one could say, water is a consistent collaborator in your work. How does it transform and play with your work?

Carpenter: I really love the idea of water as a collaborator. It’s this element that you can’t tame. Water is alive, it’s dynamic, it’s moving and it has different material states. I think about architecture as a medium to channel that, or integrate that somehow. In practice and in school, we’re always thinking about moisture and mold. How do we get the water off the roof? How do you keep it out, or how do you contain it? I’ve been thinking about water as something intimate, something that can be part of the body. What does it mean to have this dynamic element that’s running through a city, that normally we don’t even see? How do we make it more visible?

Rail: The Bentway project in Toronto is rechanneling water at a very small scale, right?

Carpenter: It creates large-scale stormwater gardens with native plantings using the rainwater that’s coming off the highway. Instead of contaminated water going directly into the ground and becoming runoff, the project creates a site of active environmental learning and a living laboratory that’s surrounded by a custom elevated scaffold system for people to access. Making the rainwater runoff process from the highway visible to create a resilient landscape below is meant to be an act of vertical daylighting.

We worked with Isaac Crosby (also known as Brother Nature), a native planting specialist in Toronto to connect the ecology of greater Ontario to the urban ecology underneath the highway. For example, it could be likened to the understory of an old growth Ontario forest and its attendant ecologies. One of the stormwater gardens is designed with native plantings similar to those that can thrive in a saltwater marsh because of the salt on the highways during the winter in Toronto. This hidden ecology underneath the highway connects into narratives about former ecologies historically along the shoreline in Toronto.

Rail: And this is not the first project that you’ve done where you’ve brought water infrastructure into the everyday. New Public Hydrant (2018/2020), which was on view at MoMA, was one of those first projects that you did. Can you talk about how that project developed?

Carpenter: My collaborator Chris Woebken and I began the project in conversation with the Department of Environmental Protection to imagine how to access and drink potable water from local fire hydrants rather than using plastic water bottles. Water from the hydrants, aside from use for emergencies, has always been identified with cooling, but it can also be used for healing or drinking. So the question was, “How do you create divergent thinking around the hydrant?” We initially developed a set of prototypes or hydrant hacks for a multi-species water fountain, a hydration station, and for a bottle fill. For the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Architecture Now: New York New Publics, we worked with the Youth Design Center on a participatory design workshop about reimagining water infrastructure in local neighborhoods. Two of the ideas that came out of the design jam were a solar hot water heater to make tea on the sidewalk and a sprinkler boombox that was powered by water. Our goal was to design a participatory process in which public infrastructure can be social and can be designed by the public so that there is agency in the work.

Rail: In the Bentway project, and in some of your other work, there’s a very clear graphic identity. You’re using precise color and materiality, and even though you’re proposing a public takeover, there is a thumbprint that is very much yours in the design.

Carpenter: The site of the Bentway is a vacant space underneath an expressway, so we needed to think about producing something vibrant that could draw people into it. I came up a couple of days before the opening, and there were already people biking and scootering in it. It’s an open and flexible space that was put to immediate use (or misuse) the minute there were platforms available on top of the rocks. We worked with Neil Donnelly on the graphic design of the Bentway project, because communication is so important in a public project of that scale, to find legibility in a 20,000 square foot public space.

Rail: Your projects are very much involved in webs of collaboration.

Carpenter: Collaboration is different every time, whether it’s other architects or artists or graphic designers. Because I’m a solo practitioner, I like to find ways to collaborate when I can. Chris is a longtime collaborator; we’ve been working together for over five years. We’re now working on another project for the Museum of Modern Art with the Ali Forney Center. It’s a nourishing way of working for me, because collaborators see things or think of things that I would never bring to the table. There is a layering and throwing down of ideas, and you create something together that you couldn’t create alone.

Rail: That’s a great point. We both teach, and often I feel like we expect our architecture students to be jacks-of-all-trades, doing site analysis, urban studies, design, and graphic design for their projects. There is so much respect for a graphic designer, who is an expert, and allowing for more collaboration can relieve an architect of some of the pressure. Speaking of collaboration, you are working on a book house project in Xinyang, China with Xu Tiantian. Could you talk about how you first entered each other’s orbit?

Carpenter: Tiantian was teaching at Yale when I was paired with her to teach a Master’s Advanced Design Studio last fall and we really hit it off. She’s inspiring in how she approaches her work in an entrepreneurial way, seeking out projects, especially in rural regions in China. She thinks about projects through the economics of a place, and catalyzes projects that don’t already exist. She introduced me to Zuo Jing, who’s the curator of the TBB Book Market projects in Xinyang. The book houses are opening up in Xinyang as a way for the city itself to be a city of books.

Rail: Can you describe what a book house is?

Carpenter: Very simply, you could say it’s a community library. But it looks very different. There are multiple book houses in Xinyang. Each is given to a different architect. My book house is about music and is called the Library of Melodies. It’s designed as a library on the top floor, an outdoor, covered performance space on the first floor with a cafe and work space. There are also outdoor reading rooms and a gallery. The programs are similar, but there is a thematic concept for each book house, which depends on the needs of each neighborhood. In this particular neighborhood, the idea of music was very important, so Zuo Jing tried to curate it in response to the community.

Rail: That’s a really nice way to engage many architects who have many visions of what knowledge can look like—reducing the exclusivity around intellectual institutions. What are your thoughts on public space and its potential for a collective voice? I am still thinking about what you said earlier about the Bentway, how you opened a space and the people came.

Carpenter: That was interesting because the Bentway is an organization that mobilizes public spaces along linear highways. They have to work between a variety of city agencies, but also business districts, public, and private organizations to connect each area around that linear highway. They’re knitting together relationships for those public spaces. We were lucky to work with them, because they know how to work with city agencies to get things built. They are open to taking risks and experimenting in public space. How do you create a forum for public space to be a platform for multiple voices, for experimentation, for different kinds of things to take place? It’s something that is not always front of mind in different cities because of safety and pressures of real estate development. It is harder to identify those public places in New York.

Rail: In New York they’re going away—

Carpenter: Or they’re getting absorbed by larger entities, and there are more privately owned public spaces. I’m very hopeful that they will still exist. I like the Open Streets program, for example. You really see that happening in the summers, the public spills out and activates these larger spaces. I’ve been thinking of how that can continue past all the issues with COVID, and how to make those things more consistent and permanent.

Rail: Your work spans many scales, from small infrastructure to exhibitions to buildings. These projects, as well as your work as an educator, are all on different timescales. Can you talk about how time is present in your work?

Carpenter: Time for me has to do with habit or ritual. In the Crown House, a mixed use residential project in Crown Heights, time can be tied to behavior and ritual. Time is not stable; for example, we do things at different paces, at different rhythms. The Crown House has the idea of the rhythm of life and the rhythm of consolidation of use in a space and how that rhythm begins to get measured somehow. In that project, the question was simply, “How does time get compressed within this twenty-four hour cycle?” How do you start to see that? Time can be a filter, and even the hydrant project is really interested in behavior. It is a ritual of how you get water, how you walk down the street, this kind of everyday experience coming across something. Time, interaction, architecture, how do these things start to bleed together? It’s not necessarily the building scale and user, but there are smaller scale interactions that do happen.

Rail: It sounds like you’re choreographing gestures that come together into a larger interwoven urbanism.

Carpenter: Choreography is a nice way to think about it, because it is about rhythm, time, and movement. A choreography of use in space.

Rail: As we start to wrap up, I want to ask about your own foundations. Could you share any of the foundations that you have in your work?

Carpenter: Some touchstones are the work of Renata Lucas, and the work of Allan Wexler and Keller Easterling. My graduate school thesis advisor was Elizabeth Diller and she would always push us to think about the critical and cultural implications of our work.

Rail: I will end with this question, which is a very small one. As a native New Yorker, what’s a dream project for you, or a vision for New York City that you want to see in the near future?

Carpenter: I’ve always wanted to do a school for kids. I’m really interested in experiential learning. Things like the Harbor School in Governors Island, where New York Harbor is the classroom, or the tradition of forest schools in Germany. I’d be really interested in thinking about what experiential learning would be like in New York. How would you design pedagogy about climate change with the city’s native ecology and its subnatures. How do you design architecture that is pedagogical and create forms of learning for kids to become stewards of the environment? I have a five-year-old, so it interests me on a personal level. Professionally, I’d be really interested in how to combine these questions of learning, education, nature, and climate into a type of space, or multiple spaces dispersed. Maybe it could be for adults too, maybe there’s no age limit.