One could say creativity has surfaced in baby steps for the husband-and-wife architectural duo of Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers.
As they initially considered names for their architectural practice a few years ago, they happened to offhandedly ask their toddler son, not yet 2, one morning what he dreamt the night beforehand.
"Dream the combine," he blurted out of the blue.
"And we were like ‘That just sounds amazing,’" Newsom said, laughing during an online video interview last year on Facebook.
The name actually stuck, since the two acknowledged that they declined for their practice to simply feature their surnames for their efforts based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The serendipitous pair is among the J. Irwin and Xenia Miller Prize recipients for the 2021 Exhibit Columbus exhibition, in which pop-up architecture is featured to highlight the past, present and future of the city’s global, Modernist impact. They spoke during a livestreamed presentation Thursday that opened the Columbus conversations portion of the virtual Exhibit Columbus symposium "New Middles: From Main Street to Megalopolis — What is the Future of the Middle City" presented on the organization’s Facebook page and its YouTube.com channel.
Alternating between a symposium one summer and an exhibition the next, Exhibit Columbus spotlights international design leaders sharing ideas and inspiration alongside various community leaders.
Newsom mentioned that the pair is honored to be designing and building as a part of next summer’s exhibition.
"We’ve been following it for a while now, thinking ‘We wish we could do that,’" Newsom said.
"We’re looking forward to exploring the metaphoric potential (in Columbus)," Carruthers said.
In 2018, Newsom and Carruthers won the Museum of Modern Art PS1’s 2018 Young Architects Program. Both hold master of architecture degrees from Yale University and have been featured in a variety of international publications.
Newsom pointed out that the couple is vitally interested in "a lot of the things in question for a long time, but things certainly brought more to the surface (amid racial tensions) this summer such as ‘How do we live together (in harmony)? How do we support one another? How do we lean on one another?’"
As Newsom spoke about this, she showed photos of burning buildings during Minneapolis’ springtime racial riots in which buildings were burned and destroyed.
"Much of our work speaks to a kind of gap in space and history, and in the ways that we think we know the world," Newsom said. "We often want our work to challenge the imagination, to complicate our known understanding of things from architecture to the building blocks of infrastructure to the systems and societal patterns that we might take for granted."
The two have worked amid rural landscapes, city streets, transportation corridors, forest landscapes and more. Carruthers mentioned that any installation they create here will represent a team effort. For the last Exhibit Columbus exhibition in 2019, the Miller Prize winners sought substantial input from the public on details of their creation, resulting in a strong community feeling.
That community aspect has been a strong theme since Exhibit Columbus first opened in 2016.
"It’s really coauthored by everyone who comes here, and will then take it with them when they leave," Carruthers said.
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- 2 p.m. Sept. 29: Thematic Conversation: Resiliency and Climate Adaptation. This conversation asks designer Iñaki Alday and landscape architect Kate Orff to reflect on how their practices are responding through landscape architecture and research to local and planetary climate crises. Moderated by Iker Gil, 2020–21 Exhibit Columbus curator.
- Noon Oct. 1: Columbus Conversation: Resiliency and Climate Adaptation. What is Columbus’ past and future relationship with its own ecology and resiliency? Miller Prize recipients Belinda Tato and Jose Luis Vallejo of Ecosistema Urbano join Heather Pope, Columbus’ director of redevelopment, and local landscape architect Rachel Kavathe in a dialogue that looks at Columbus’ historic relationship to its waterways and future ecological initiatives through the Riverfront Redevelopment Plan, and the introduction of pollinator parks to this area. Moderated by Janice Shimizu of Exhibit Columbus and Ball State University.
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