Profile
Jennifer Bonner is a designer and educator whose work challenges conventions of architectural form, representation, and materiality through playful experimentation and cultural critique. As founder and director of MALL (Mass Architectural Loopty Loops or Maximum Arches with Limited Liability), she advances a speculative design practice with an intentionally mutable acronym that reflects her broader interest in linguistic, formal, and conceptual flexibility. Her projects often engage Southern identity, material assemblies, and collective housing with a distinctive visual language that is both critical and exuberant.
Bonner holds a bachelor of architecture from Auburn University and a master of architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she received the James Templeton Kelley Prize. Her undergraduate thesis, Cedar Pavilion, constructed at Rural Studio in Alabama, was recognized with the AR Award for Emerging Architecture. Prior to founding her practice, she worked with Foster + Partners and David Chipperfield Architects in London and Istanbul.
She is the author of A Guide to the Dirty South: Atlanta and editor of Blank: Speculations on CLT (with Hanif Kara), Platform: Still Life, and a special issue of ART PAPERS focused on the architecture and design of Los Angeles. Her writing and projects have been featured widely, from trade publications such as Architectural Review, Metropolis, Azure, and Wallpaper to more experimental platforms including a+t, PLAT, Room One Thousand, Flat Out, and MAS Context.
Bonner’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Royal Institute of British Architects, the National Building Museum, Istanbul Modern, Yale Architecture Gallery, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway. Her installations and drawings foreground the power of visual communication in architecture, often blending humor with historical and regional analysis.
She has received numerous awards and honors, including a United States Artists Fellowship, the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, and the Progressive Architecture Award. In academia, Bonner served as director of the M.Arch II program and associate professor of architecture at Harvard University from 2015 to 2023, and she has held visiting appointments at Woodbury University and the Georgia Institute of Technology as the TVSDesign Distinguished Studio Critic.
Bonner is a visiting critic at the Rice School of Architecture.