Profile
Brittany Utting is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Rice University in Houston, TX, and co-founder of the research and design collaborative HOME-OFFICE. Her work examines the relationship between architecture and planetary practices of environmental care. She is the editor of the book Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common (Routledge, 2023), which examines how spaces of care shape our affective, material, and social forms. She is co-editor of Log 60: The Sixth Sphere (Winter/Summer 2024), exploring the spatial, environmental, and material expressions of the technosphere. This special issue laid the groundwork for the 2024-24 group exhibition The Sixth Sphere, curated by Utting at the Rice School of Architecture, gathering projects that imagine how design can participate in planetary systems of interdependence, reciprocity, and transition.
She is also co-editor of the forthcoming Journal for Architectural Education 79:1: Architecture Beyond Extraction (Spring 2025). Her writings have been published in The Avery Review, MIT Thresholds, e-flux Architecture, AA Files, Log, and the JAE. Utting has been a MacDowell Fellow in Architecture and the Willard A. Oberdick Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation and the Buell Center. She holds a Master of Architecture from Yale University and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Utting is a registered architect in New York, and prior to co-founding HOME-OFFICE, she practiced at Thomas Phifer and Partners as a project designer for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
Her design practice, HOME-OFFICE, explores architecture as an environmental medium through speculative designs, experimental representation, and exhibition. Recent projects include MESO-COSM, an exhibition at the University of Houston and recipient of the 2024 ACSA Faculty Design Award, that examines the relationship between architecture and the ecologies of the Gulf Coast region, focusing on how urbanization in Houston’s periphery is affecting local landscapes and water infrastructures. FIELD-STATION, a public art piece commissioned by Washington University in St. Louis, is an architectural experiment that explores the spatial practices of environmental sensing, climate action, and forest care. Another project is HOUSTON-VARATIONS, recipient of the 2022 Houston Design Research Grant. The project proposes twenty new typological permutations for Houston's low-rise drive-in courtyard apartment, testing the relationship between environmental enclosure and form. Through research and design, HOME-OFFICE engages with the reciprocity between living ecosystems and architecture’s technical and material conditions.