Working From Off Center

Tei Carpenter - Agency—Agency / Columbia GSAPP
Jesse LeCavalier - LeCavalier R+D / NJIT / Yale

Tei Carpenter is an architectural designer, educator and founder of award-winning New York City-based design studio Agency—Agency. The studio’s recently completed work includes a new non-profit headquarters in downtown Houston and a winning entry for LA+ Journal’s island competition. In 2018, Agency—Agency was named one of the New Practices New York by the American Institute of Architects New York. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation where she directs the Waste Initiative, an applied research and design platform. Carpenter’s design and research work into architecture’s entanglement with emerging natures has been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and exhibited at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, the 2016 Venice Biennale and will be included in Water Futures, a forthcoming exhibition at BMW’s A/D/O. Recent design work and writing have appeared in Architect, Cite, Plat and RIBA Journal. Previously she has taught at Brown University, Cornell University, City College of New York and at Rice University as the Wortham Visiting Lecturer. Carpenter earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy from Brown University and her Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University where she was awarded the Howard Crosby Butler Traveling Fellowship in Architecture.

Jesse LeCavalier‘s work explores the architectural and urban implications of contemporary logistics. He is the author of The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and an associate professor of architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is currently the Daniel Rose Visiting Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Architecture. LeCavalier was the recipient of the 2015 New Faculty Teaching Award from the Association of the Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the 2010–11 Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared in Cabinet, Public Culture, Places, Art Papers, and Harvard Design Magazine. His installation “Architectures of Fulfillment” was part of the 2017 Seoul Biennale for Architecture and Urbanism as his project “Shelf Life” was one of five finalists for the 2018 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program. LeCavalier holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University, a Master of Architecture from the University of California Berkeley, and a Doctor of Science from the ETH Zurich.