The Rice School of Architecture welcomes designer and educator Jennifer Bonner for her lecture On Cuteness. Known for her playful experimentation with form, representation, and materiality, Bonner challenges architectural conventions through a design approach that is at once critical, exuberant, and deeply engaged with questions of culture and identity.
As founder and director of MALL (Mass Architectural Loopty Loops or Maximum Arches with Limited Liability), Bonner advances a speculative design practice whose intentionally mutable acronym reflects her interest in linguistic, formal, and conceptual flexibility. Her work frequently addresses Southern identity, material assemblies, and collective housing, deploying a distinctive visual language that blends humor, historical reference, and regional analysis.
Bonner’s projects have been exhibited internationally at venues including the Royal Institute of British Architects, the National Building Museum, Istanbul Modern, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway. Her publications include A Guide to the Dirty South: Atlanta and editorial projects such as Blank: Speculations on CLT (with Hanif Kara) and a special issue of ART PAPERS on Los Angeles architecture and design.
Her numerous awards include a United States Artists Fellowship, the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, and the Progressive Architecture Award. Bonner holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Auburn University and a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she received the James Templeton Kelley Prize. She served as director of the M.Arch II program and associate professor at Harvard GSD from 2015 to 2023, and is currently a visiting critic at the Rice School of Architecture.
This event is free and open to the public.
This program is made possible through the generous support of the Betty R. and George F. Pierce Jr., FAIA, Fund; the William B. Coleman Jr. Colloquium Fund for Architecture; and the Wm. W. Caudill Lecture Series Fund.