This event will be conducted in-person in Room 315F and through Zoom. 

For in-person attendance, please register in advance here.
For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.

French 2D will discuss recent housing and civic installations that require collaborative processing. Here processing will be explored as both a conceptual framework and a practical form of thinking through and around collective ideas, emotions, and negotiations. 

French 2D is a Boston studio founded by Jenny French and Anda French, AIA. Their work focuses on uncommon housing types, found in cohousing, compact living, and adaptive reuse projects. The practice also works on civic installations and exhibitions that call upon the domestic to bring people together for familiar rituals in unfamiliar spaces, found in furniture, textiles, and environments. French 2D has received numerous awards including the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices Award, an ARCHITECT Magazine P/A Award, and Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard. In 2024 French 2D was nominated for the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize and in 2023 was a Finalist for the Architectural Review’s Emerging Award. Their work has been featured in Domus, AZURE, PLOT, Metropolis, Monocle, and The Architect’s Newspaper, and exhibited at MoMA, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and in the solo show “House Clothes” at UMASS Amherst. Jenny is an Assistant Professor in Practice at the Harvard GSD and Anda is a Professor of Practice at the Princeton SoA.

The Eleanore Pettersen Lecture Series

The Eleanore Pettersen Lecture, established through a generous gift to The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, is dedicated to the voices of women in architecture as a lasting tribute to Ms. Pettersen's significant impact in the world of architecture and her love of The Cooper Union. Pettersen, who had worked as an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright and would later design the post-White House home of Richard M. Nixon, was one of the first women to be licensed as an architect in New Jersey, and developed a successful practice there that spanned over fifty years.

Lectures in this series have been given by Toshiko Mori (2005), Phyllis Lambert (2006), Elizabeth Wright Ingraham (2008), Billie Tsien (2009), Francine Houben (2011), Sarah Wigglesworth (2013), Farshid Moussavi (2014), and Mabel O. Wilson (2020).

This event is free and open to the public. Reservation is required.