Katie Colford is an architect in Boston, asking questions and exploring their answers through design , research , and writing .

—How can we share architecture?

Give and Take

Give and Take was a two week-long installation transforming an academic gallery into a room for giving and receiving gifts. —with Clare Fentress and Dilara Karademir

Main Street Grounds

Main Street Grounds is a school and a public landscape that tells a story about the economic past and future of Farmington, New Mexico. —with Brian Orser

Residue as Resistance

This project suggests a method for embedding care for laborers into the construction process, which leaves a "residue" that offers care more permanently in post-construction, too. —with Audrey Tseng Fischer

Unearthing / Attending [project website]

Architectural design, considered at multiple “tempos” and scales, can be used to amplify care infrastructure in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, by redirecting the focus of design towards health, safety, and welfare. —with Audrey Tseng Fischer

—What do we mean when we talk about "crisis"? How can architecture respond to landscapes presumed to be in crisis?

See / Sea Changes

Through its own decomposition, a flooded waterfront building could regenerate a salt marsh ecosystem.

Bedrock of Investment

This analysis of Lionel Hampton Houses (Bond Ryder & Associates, 1971-73), a Mitchell-Lama project in Central Harlem, considers the ways in which the project's various actors—from the eponymous donor to the architects—had a stake in Harlem's supposed "crisis," and how that impacted the architecture of this housing complex.

The Right-of-Way Crisis

This project brings the practice of salvage archaeology—the emergency excavation of archaeological sites that fall within the right-of-way of infrastructural construction—to bear on the discourse of settler colonialism in order to situate preservation as key to its epistemology.

—Where does nature end and artifice begin?

Accumulation: Plastic Provocations

This project brings questions about the material of plastic to bear on the design of a "library for living"—a lending library for household objects.

Entropy

This study is a commentary on the multiscalar impacts of open-pit mining, from the molecular to the atmospheric.

As You Keep It

Through a close reading of the pastoral play As You Like It, I suggest that for Shakespeare, a passive nature may never be “natural,” but nature can be an active participant in human life.

Abandoning Authenticity: A Closer Look at Cumin

It is often spices that give a cuisine its distinct local—and perhaps "authentic"—taste. By taking a closer look at cumin as one such important spice, I suggest that we may rethink what is growable in order to begin building new cuisines.

Drawing Growth

An attempt to capture, through drawing, the profound way in which a plant's abundant capacity for growth undermines a worldview of scarcity and competition.

—Where does "inside" end and "outside" begin?

Understory / Overstory

This project uses landscape to distinguish two units for two residents who formerly experienced homelessness.

Chair

With one steel loop for a frame and the seat woven through it, this chair considers the tectonic implications of weaving at the scale of furniture.

Field Observations

This book project pairs images taken from a construction site with those sourced from contemporary and historical art practices. The pairings aim to recast our perceptions of the limits of a job site, suggesting that it could be something much more expansive.

Tracing the Interior

This project involves both analytical writing and drawing to investigate four types of American domestic interiors, from the 17th to the 20th century, and the different ways in which these historical homes demarcate space and property.

—How can a found image or condition be translated into space?

Creatures

By translating an illustration of sea monsters by Edward Steed to generate a reflected ceiling plan drawing, this project embodies a set of "creatures" through roof framing.

Projection as Weaving

This study imagines how an image by the Venezuelan artist Gego could be "projected" into three-dimensional space through weaving and casting.

Gatehouse

This project is designed for an unusual protagonist—the Ancient Mariner from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epic poem.

—How should we talk about architecture? What’s important, what’s interesting, what’s funny?

"Essential"

Paprika! Volume 6, Issue 6.
This issue takes up the saliency of the term "essential" during the Covid-19 pandemic and questions the politics of value that "essential" implies for the discipline of architecture.

"Just Architecture"

Paprika! Volume 6, Issue 11.
This issue seeks to problematize the typical divide between form and politics and instead consider how architecture may be just—ethical, truthful—but also just architecture—form, theory, representation—all at once.

Humor writing

"A joke is a very serious thing," said Winston Churchill. I agree, and I'm trying to convince other architects.