Connor Gravelle
Assistant Professor Adjunct
Connor Gravelle is a licensed architect and researcher whose work examines the material, social, and ecological entanglements of architecture with its contexts. His design work focuses on the building as a site of profound and shifting contingency, where disciplinary abstraction meets the physical realities of material and climate. Buildings site architecture’s agency in the world, Connor argues, in both their construction and inhabited afterlives. Likewise, at a moment of broad uncertainty, they offer a medium for not just surviving but locating meaningful and ultimately beautiful ways of living that are both climatically adaptive and equitable. Connor’s work occurs across multiple registers: through his design practice, Present Relations, and B39ES, a design collective he co-founded in 2025 with Cat Chen.
Originally from Massachusetts, Connor has held research positions at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and exhibited work at the Architecture and Design Museum of Los Angeles (2017, 2019–20) and at Harvard GSD (2024–25). His writing has appeared in Urban Omnibus (2026, forthcoming), Pidgin (2026), PLAT Journal (2020), Archinect (2018–19), and Chung-Ang University’s Institute of Cultural Diversity Content (2021). His professional training includes work at Handel Architects and HWKN in New York, BCHO Architects Associates in Seoul, and several offices in Los Angeles and London. Prior to joining Cooper Union, Connor held positions at Harvard GSD’s summer immersion program and Cornell University, where he taught BArch studios, co-advised both graduate and undergraduate theses, and led a seminar about the ecological entanglements of everyday construction materials.
Connor holds an MArch II with distinction from Harvard GSD, where he was awarded the Gerald M. McCue Medal and the James Templeton Kelley Prize. He earned his BArch degree from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), where he received the AIA Henry Adams Medal, the Alpha Rho Chi Medal, and the Blythe and Thom Mayne Undergraduate Thesis Prize.
Connor's CV is available here.
Projects
The Only Way Out is Through
Despite the inherently material nature of buildings, architecture works largely in abstraction, whether by way of drawings, models, or other forms of intermediation. The Only Way Out is Through, a graduate thesis from Harvard Graduate School of Design, looks at the material, social, and ecological consequences of this occlusion through the frame of one material in one place at one time: steel, in Chicago, in the 1890s. While the city’s explosive transition to steel construction is well-trodden in the annals of architectural history, comparatively little scholarship has invested equal attention in the mines, infrastructural networks, and industrial communities implicit in such immense transformations. The project trains its focus on Gary, Indiana, a city along Chicago's frontier that was constructed solely for the purpose of producing steel. A century after its construction, the city, once defined by extraction and manufacturing, is now adrift in the brutal realities of America's post-industrial economy. The project imagines a near-future bankruptcy of the US Steel Corporation and thus a radical decommissioning of Gary's signature steel facility. Through alternative forms of material reuse and workforce reskilling, it asks how architecture might claim agency in designing less extractive and more ecologically reciprocal modes of living and working across the American Rust Belt. Advised by Eric Höweler.
Lavadero Pequeño
Developed as a finalist proposal for the 2026 Concéntrico festival in Logroño, Spain, Lavadero Pequeño reinterprets the region's historic lavaderos, outdoor washhouses once central to domestic life, where the community, especially women, gathered not only to labor but to share knowledge and form social bonds. The proposal transforms the lavadero's defining geometry—its elongated basin and sloped edges—into a linear public footbath shaded by a lightweight textile canopy, thus reimagining a typology historically associated with labor as one for collective cooling, rest, and care. Designed with Cat Chen as B39ES.
Upstate Dwelling
Conceptualized as a pattern book ADU design for Ithaca, New York, this proposal considers how simple alterations to the standard single-family house can reconfigure its spatial relationships, both socially and environmentally. In this case, the project works from the pitched-roof form ubiquitous in America's suburban communities. Spatially hermetic and associated with single-family lifestyles, the typology is transformed through the rotation of the roof, creating two large overhangs. These new spaces, unfamiliar in their original vernacular, both engage and break from their context, resting ambiguously between interior and exterior. While the harsh climate of upstate New York often necessitates heavy insulation and a frugal treatment of openings, this maneuver opens an abundance of interstitial space between occupants and their neighbors. In such thresholds, encounters between the domestic and its exterior are encouraged as a way of finding new, interdependent relations in the otherwise individualistic form of the single-family home. Designed with Cat Chen and Marcos Escamilla-Guerrero as B39ES.
Curtain Call
Curtain Call imagines a temporary performance infrastructure for a suburban community outside Chicago. Located on a large property whose perimeter meets a prairie ecosystem, the project repurposes the material theatrics of the stage curtain to create alternative forms of enclosure and encounter between performers, audience, and environment. Designed with Cat Chen as B39ES.
Low Energy ADU
In what ways do new zoning codes, energy paradigms, and construction methods leave their mark on the domestic architecture of the American city? This project envisions an affordable and highly replicable strategy for ADU construction in Boston's lower-density neighborhoods. The design responds to a city initiative to increase both housing and homeowner equity, particularly for historically marginalized communities. Taking its cues from new zoning amendments aimed at encouraging ADU construction, as well as a robust analysis of typical lot conditions, it proposes a new domestic form whose spatial and functional flexibility suits many households currently underserved by Boston's housing stock: young couples, single-parent households, and seniors seeking to age in place. Its dimensions and architectural articulation continue this logic of pragmatic accommodation, establishing a design language fit for both on-site and remote construction. The Low Energy ADU aims for an architecture linked to the systems that shape it, responsive to questions of energy, community, and labor that its context too often leaves out. Designed at the Laboratory for Values in the Built Environment (ViBE Lab) at Harvard Graduate School of Design.
4x8 Chair
While frequently associated with handcraft, contemporary furniture is manufactured through increasingly digital means. 4x8 Chair works opportunistically within the circumstances of contemporary fabrication to arrive at both a single, "standard" lounge chair and, more broadly, a tectonic strategy applicable to a range of other domestic items. For this chair, this process begins with the material constraints of its production: the 4x8 plywood sheet. Its design reflects the capacities and constraints of this commonplace material source, accommodating a flat-packed design within the boundaries of a single sheet. The design's assembly extends this logic through an interlocking system that provides structural stability without nails, screws, or glue, while its detailing expresses its CNC production through a series of dog-bone corner joints. As much a project about form as material, the chair asks how the design of everyday domestic objects can more directly reflect the increasingly digital nature of contemporary making.
