Katie Swenson is a nationally recognized design leader, researcher, writer, and educator. She is a Senior Principal of MASS Design Group, an international non-profit architecture firm whose mission is to research, build, and advocate for architecture that promotes justice and human dignity. Before joining MASS in early 2020, Swenson was vice president of Design & Sustainability at Enterprise Community Partners, Inc., a national nonprofit that invested over $43.6 billion in community development. She founded Enterprise’s National Design Initiative, directing the Affordable Housing Design Leadership Institute, the Pre-Development Design Grant, and the Rose Fellowship. The Rose Fellowship partners emerging architectural designers and cultural practitioners with local community development organizations to facilitate an inclusive approach to development resulting in sustainable and affordable communities.
A prolific writer, she released two books in the fall of 2020: Design with Love: At Home in America, and In Bohemia: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Kindness, both by Schiffer Publishing. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and a Master of Architecture from The University of Virginia. Katie was also a Harvard University Graduate School of Design Loeb Fellow in 2018-2019, and has taught at the Boston Architectural College and Parsons School of Design at The New School and lectured extensively on sustainable community development and affordable housing.
In this episode, Katie shares journey of becoming an architect, and her passion for the act of building and the act of making homes. Katie talks about how her work at MASS Design Group during the pandemic, what, makes MASS Design Group unique, and how they stay mission driven, and lead with both ideas as well as strong design work. Katie also opens up about her experiences with love and life and loss, and how those all coalesced in her recently published memoir, In Bohemia. Katie talks about writing as a way to explore and be curious about life, and we both share our experiences of writing through grief.
Learn more about Katie at www.katieswenson.com.
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