Brittany Utting

Brittany Utting is an assistant professor of architecture at Rice University and cofounder of the research and design collaborative HOME-OFFICE. Her work examines the relationship between architecture, collective life, and environmental care. She is the editor of Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common (Routledge, 2023), which examines how spaces of care shape our affective, material, and social forms, from the most intimate scale of the body to our planetary commons. She is a guest editor of the special issue Log 60: The Sixth Sphere with Albert Pope (Winter/Summer 2024). This issue will interrogate the technosphere's spatial, environmental, and material expressions, exploring how design can imagine alternative climate futures.

Her design practice, HOME-OFFICE, explores architecture as an environmental medium through speculative designs, experimental representation, and exhibition. Recent projects include: MESO-COSM, an exhibition at the University of Houston that examined the relationship between architecture and the ecologies of the Gulf Coast region, focusing on how urbanization in Houston’s periphery is affecting local landscapes and water infrastructures. FIELD-STATION, a public art piece commissioned by Washington University in St. Louis, is an architectural experiment that explores the spatial practices of environmental sensing, climate action, and forest care. Another project is HOUSTON-VARATIONS, which is the recipient of the 2022 Houston Design Research Grant. The project proposes twenty new typological permutations for Houston's low-rise drive-in courtyard apartment, testing the relationship between environmental enclosure and form. Through research and design, HOME-OFFICE engages with the reciprocity between living ecosystems and architecture’s technical and material conditions.

Utting has been a MacDowell Fellow and a Willard A. Oberdick Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. She is a registered architect in New York, and before cofounding HOME-OFFICE, she practiced at Thomas Phifer and Partners as a project designer for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.