CENTRE STAGE

The American Midwest has been shaking up the world of architecture. These exciting young studios are approaching design with bold ideas and new takes, thinking outside the box for a better future for our built environment – in the US and beyond. Innovation is the name of this architectural game. In our Next Generation series, we explore just how each of these ten practices is pioneering change through a series of profiles

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THE CROSS-POLLINATORS

Thomas Carruthers & Jennifer Newsom Dream the Combine, Minneapolis, MN

‘What we make is something that looks beneath the surface level of things,’ says Dream the Combine’s Jennifer Newsom. ‘We are looking for pretty fundamental things,’ adds her husband and studio cofounder, Thomas Carruthers. ‘Who decides what we see? Who gets to feel as though they belong? We have certain ways we are trained to receive information, and there are also social constructs that order our reality. In some ways, our work straddles the built form and social infrastructure.’ Such questions and more lie at the heart of the practice, which was founded in 2013 in Minneapolis and is now based between there and Ithaca, NY, where Newsom and Carruthers have just joined the architecture faculty at Cornell University. The studio is highly unconventional. While traditional building work is certainly part of what they do (both of them are qualified architects), the majority of their output is more akin to art, taking the form of installations and largescale structures that touch on a great variety of subjects. Examples include their recent participation in the 2021 Exhibit Columbus, Indiana’s annual architectural festival. Their piece, Columbus Columbia Colombo Colón, was a comment on the ubiquity of the name of Christopher Columbus and the narrative around it. ‘The name and its legacy is everywhere, it is impossible not to see it,’ says Carruthers.

Each founder offers a different take as to what their breakthrough project was. For Newsom, it was Hide & Seek, created for the 2018 Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1. For Carruthers, it was an earlier work,