Building community with the Office for Socially Engaged Practice

“It’s easy to get stuck in our own heads about how we want to make a design. But once you have the end user in front of you, and you’re able to talk with them, it really gives you a different perspective.” — Nicholas Chiu, graduate architecture and urban design student.

The Sam Fox School is celebrating its 20th anniversary in the 2025-26 academic year, and with it, a renewed commitment to building and sustaining relationships with community partners throughout St. Louis. Part of that commitment includes an emphasis on collaborations through the school’s Office for Socially Engaged Practice, especially design-build projects. “When we started planning for our next decade,” Matt Bernstine, director of the office said, “taking on a community-driven actionable project was at the top of our list. A design-build project provides meaningful real-world experience for students and very direct support for our community.”

To pilot the idea of a design-build project, the office created the inaugural Summer Public Design Workshop in summer 2025. Chief among its goals was to ensure that the school was really listening to its community in St. Louis. “We put out a call for proposals to our neighbors and received lots of worthy project ideas,” Bernstine said.

The selected proposal came from Fatimah Muhammad, founder of the nonprofit Be Well Café & Market, 25-year resident of St. Louis’ Hyde Park neighborhood, and chair of the Hyde Park neighborhood association. “Hyde Park is a very purposely disinvested area that is now on the rebound,” she said. “Be Well addresses the lack of fresh, affordable food access, the lack of support for black and brown minorities, and the lack of development that occurs here.”

Muhammad established a farmers market across from the café in 2020 and has been working toward her vision of a permanent pavilion ever since. Students who participated in the workshop designed, prototyped, and fabricated custom metal screens that will enclose the pavilion. When completed, the screens will provide both security and an expressive visual identity for the market.

Throughout the three-week program, students met with Muhammad several times, including a site visit to learn more about the project’s context, along with presenting their design proposals for the screens. “The students really set the tone for me,” Muhammad said. “After coming out to the site and spending time getting a feel for the space and the community, they gave me some beautiful selections to choose from.”

Chandler Ahrens, chair of graduate architecture, and Gregory Cuddihee, project manager for public design projects, led the workshop. “Students started out with no preconceived ideas, then came up with a design and fabricated it in just three weeks,” Ahrens said. The final week tasked the students with choosing materials and fabrication techniques — aided by Ahrens’ and Cuddihee’s expertise in fabrication — and building the prototype on campus. The pavilion was designed by Bemberg Architecture, led by alumnus Max Bemberg, MArch ’11, and is set to break ground this fall.

This project “was very different from working in studio or in academia, because I was working with real life people, a team, and a client,” undergraduate architecture student Huda Abdesumad said.

Muhammad found the collaboration meaningful and said she enjoyed seeing the students’ creativity and vision. “By working hand in hand with the community, I have no doubt that their contributions will leave a meaningful and lasting impact on our neighborhood,” she said.

Carmen Ribaudo, who earned her MFA in Visual Art from the Sam Fox School in 2025 and is the 2025-26 academic year’s Post-MFA Studio Fellow, noted that the project was an example of how to work thoughtfully and responsibly as an artist in collaboration with others. “The Office for Socially Engaged Practice was one of the things that I saw made WashU unique,” she said. “I saw that there was a lot being prioritized here for social engagement in the arts.”

In its next decade, Bernstine and his team hope that the office will take on more community driven design-build projects and continue its role as a connector for students and the community beyond campus. “Our office is a resource not only for students and faculty to grow their ideas, their research, and engage with their community, but also for community residents and stakeholders to identify projects and bring them to WashU to work on them together,” he said.