Anda French and Jenny French. Photo: Steph Larsen.
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Bay State Cohousing. Photo: Naho Kubota.
Anda French, AIA, and Jenny French | Eugene J. Mackey Jr. Lecture
Anda French, AIA, and Jenny French, partners of Boston-based French 2D, will deliver the 2024 Eugene J. Mackey Jr. Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
French 2D is an award-winning Boston studio founded by Jenny French and Anda French, AIA. Their work centers collaboration across multiple scales, from participatory events/installations to urban-scale textiles and buildings for collective living.
French 2D was internationally recognized as a 2023 Finalist for the Architectural Review’s Emerging Award. The firm received a 2020 P/A (Progressive Architecture) Award from Architect Magazine, and a Design Vanguard award from Architectural Record, and has been featured in Domus, Metropolis, The Architect’s Newspaper, and in the solo show “House Clothes” at UMASS Amherst. Anda is a visiting lecturer at the Princeton School of Architecture. Jenny is an assistant professor in the practice of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
About Anda French, AIA
Anda French, AIA, NCARB is a partner in French 2D and a Visiting Faculty member at the Princeton School of Architecture.
Anda was the 2022 President of the Boston Society of Architects/AIA, where she served as Director-at-Large, co-chaired the BSA’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Task Force since 2018, and organized the BSA’s Now Practice Now Series, She is a registered Architect in Massachusetts and is NCARB Certified.
Anda received a B.A. in Architecture from Barnard College, Columbia University, and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University. Anda’s teaching and design research has been funded by an Imagining America Grant for Artists and Scholars in Public Life, and she has participated in a variety of panels and symposia on housing, women in design, and practice. She has also taught at Syracuse University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and in the Barnard + Columbia Undergraduate Architecture Program, and in the MIT Department of Architecture.
About Jenny French
Jenny French is a partner in French 2D and an assistant professor in practice of architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she has also served as coordinating faculty in architecture for the Design Discovery Program since 2017.
Jenny received a B.A. in Art History and Studio Art from Dartmouth College and a Master of Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She is a recipient of Harvard’s Julia A. Appleton Traveling Fellowship and has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. Jenny has taught at Northeastern University, Tufts University, the Boston Architectural College, and served as a thesis advisor at RISD. Jenny’s design research on site visits to unbuilt architecture has been exhibited at the Harvard GSD and is included in the Cornell Journal of Architecture, Issue 10: Spirits.
Place/Setting
Joining forces with civically engaged social scientists, innovators and activists, French 2D and Gabriel Mugar created Place/Setting, a series of collaborative meals set in an installation that traces the productive conversations that happen within its space during HUBweek 2017 on Boston on City Hall Plaza. Courtesy French 2D and HUBweek.
Bay State Cohousing
Bay State Cohousing is a 30-unit community self-developed by its residents family, at the northern edge of Metropolitan Boston. Following the Cohousing ethos, each of the 30 units provide the amenities of a private home, while also creating a community around shared spaces and resources.
Photo: Naho Kubota.
Bay State Cohousing
Photo: Naho Kubota.
1047 Commonwealth micro-housing
In association with Neshamkin French Architects, Inc., French 2D led the design and construction of both the interior and exterior of the 180 micro unit housing project in Boston. Units vary from 340-370 square feet and communal living amenities like a lounge, library and fitness area are provided.
Photo: French 2D.
Recording
More Upcoming Lectures
Nov 19 at 5:30pm • Steinberg Auditorium
Artist Panel: Mary Weatherford and Katharina Grosse
Artists Katharina Grosse and Mary Weatherford, whose works are featured in Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection, both engage forms of nonfigurative painting that have a strong sensorial presence. A discussion moderated by Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator, will explore how their polyphonic structures invite careful seeing to suggest alternative worlds.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series
About the Artists
Katharina Grosse was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany in 1961. She has held professorships at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2010–18) and Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin (2000–9) and currently lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand. Her recent institutional exhibitions and on-site paintings include The Sprayed Dear at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (until January 2026), Wunderbild at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (until September 2025), Déplacer les étoiles, Centre Pompidou – Metz (2024–25); Why Three Tones Do Not Form a Triangle; Albertina, Vienna (2023–24); and Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions, Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2022), toured to Kunstmuseum Bern (2023) and Kunstmuseum Bonn (2024). In June 2025, she realized a temporary in-situ work for Art Basel on the fair’s forecourt and the adjacent architectural structures. Museum collections include Albertina, Vienna; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen; Baltimore Museum of Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Istanbul Modern; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Magasin III, Stockholm; MARe (Muzeul de Artă Recentă / Museum of Recent Art), Bucharest; MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; Museum Azman, Jakarta; Museum of Fine Arts Bern; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Serralves Museum, Porto; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; and QAGOMA, Brisbane.
Photo Credit: Franz Grünewald
Mary Weatherford was born in Ojai, California. She earned a BA from Princeton University in 1984, was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1985, and graduated with an MFA from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in 2006. Weatherford makes paintings that evoke a specific time, locale, and temperature. Her recent works, in which the canvases are affixed and sometimes juxtaposed with working neon light, provide an elusive and sometimes radical comment on the legacy of gestural abstraction. Weatherford is noted for her masterful use of overlapping fields of color, and as her work has advanced the increasingly complex and luminous interactions between paint, lighting, and wiring have produced a hybrid form that collapses the distinction between painting and installation. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Photo Credit: Antony Hoffman