Gensler Visiting Critic Lecture: Katie Swenson — Holding the Center: Architecture at the Scale of Human and Ecological Health

Abstract

For most of her career, Katie Swenson believed she was studying housing. Two decades spent working alongside residents, community leaders, and architects across the United States, and later in Rwanda, taught her she was studying something larger: the relationships that allow people, and the ecosystems they depend on, to belong.

This lecture traces that shift through the Rwandan concept of the inkingi, the central structural pole of a traditional home, buried as deep into the earth as it rises into the sky. Every home, Swenson argues, has an inkingi, and so does every institution, community, and ecosystem: an underlying structure of care that holds it together. The task of architecture, she suggests, is not simply to design buildings, but to identify and strengthen that structure.

Drawing on projects from MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society), including the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund Campus, the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture, the Neighborhood Birth Center, the Brooklyn Public Library’s New Lots branch, El Cementerio del Barrio de los Lipanes, the Sugar Land 95 Memorial, the Iftin Peace Hub, the Moving Windmills Innovation Center, and the African Design Centre, the talk moves through four registers of care: for ecological systems, for human dignity, for memory, and for future generations.

Together, these projects suggest a different premise for design: care is not simply delivered in space; care is produced by space. And the work ahead, for architects and communities alike, is learning how to hold the center.

Biography

Katie Swenson, Gensler Visiting Critic

Katie Swenson is a nationally recognized design leader, author, educator, and speaker whose work explores how architecture can advance human dignity, ecological health, and social equity. Since 2020, she has served as Senior Principal at MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society), where she leads strategic partnerships connecting design, storytelling, and philanthropy to advance systems change globally.

With more than two decades of experience, Swenson believes design begins with human potential and that architecture is one of society’s most powerful tools for creating healthier, more just, and more resilient communities.

In 2026, Swenson is serving as the Gensler Visiting Critic at Cornell University’s School of Architecture. She has also taught at Parsons School of Design (The New School) and Columbia GSAPP.

Swenson authored Design with Love: At Home in America and In Bohemia: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Kindness, and contributed to Spatial (In) Justice and several books on architecture and community design. Before MASS, she was Vice President of Design & Sustainability at Enterprise Community Partners, leading the nationally recognized Rose Fellowship. She also cofounded the Charlottesville Community Design Center.

Swenson received the 2021 AIA Award for Excellence in Public Architecture and frequently keynotes on design’s role in shaping thriving people, places, and communities.