Visiting Assistant Professor of Practice Ben Pennell Featured in Architectural Record's Annual Design Vanguard Program

Recently, Visiting Assistant Professor of Practice Ben Pennell was featured in Architectural Record’s annual Design Vanguard program, showcasing 10 leading young firms and individual practitioners. 

Below is an excerpt from the full article:

Ben Pennell is reaching for the future of architecture with dirt-caked hands. He has built and financed many of his projects, either alone or with a ragtag group of students, friends, and tradespeople. And whatever he earned from one project he plowed into the next. There is an element of impatience at play; Pennell, 32, isn’t predisposed to waiting for work (or permission to build). But he also believes other architects should embrace the opportunities lurking in what he describes as the banalities of building. “The odds of realizing a piece of architecture through direct means, like my own investment, are slightly higher than simply waiting by the phone or, God forbid, some competition with thousands of entrants,” he says.

This kind of do-it-yourself architecture is Pennell’s bedrock. Raised by architect parents, he interned with Lloyd Russell in San Diego and Neil Denari in Los Angeles, and spent two years at Weiss/Manfredi in New York, before starting his practice. Pennell “drank in the excitement and professional atmosphere” at the latter and got a thrill making models for international projects he knew would one day be built.

Today’s young architects must play by different rules to find a proper outlet for their creative work, Pennell insists. But he also hopes to “preserve the spirit of the discipline.” This tension has led him to yearn for a return to the architect-as-builder model, a deliberately provocative posture intended to shake off decades, even centuries, of accumulated rust. As Pennell sees it, there’s no other way forward—for him, or the profession. “My dream is to do away with the ‘architectural firm’ and instead run a workshop in exactly the same way as Rembrandt or Bernini,” he says. “Why not just build the thing yourself? We could include the cost of construction in our fee structure, and eliminate the insufferably long, incoherent CD sets that, ultimately, the subs always ignore anyhow!”