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Productive Frictions
November 20, 2025 | 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Date & Time
Thursday, November 20, 2025 (5-6 p.m.)
French 2D will lecture about seeing and making together, negotiating authorship through collaborative processes that challenge traditional architectural narratives and approaching practice, research, and teaching through a situated frame. They will discuss housing, civic installations and textiles, all understood as both a process and a product of collective work, policy change, formal legibility and playfulness.
As the work shifts back and forth between a series of entangled themes and often contradictory forces close to home, the lecture will explore excerpts of French 2D’s work through the framing of productive frictions – or as Mckenzie Wark writes about Anna Tsing’s conception of friction “thinking about these antimonies through a study of various competing universals as they get mixed up in local situations.”
Biography
Anda French
Princeton University SoA, Visiting Lecturer
French 2D, Partner
Jenny French
Harvard GSD, Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture
French 2D, Partner
French 2D is a Boston studio founded by Jenny French and Anda French, AIA. French 2D’s work focuses on uncommon housing types, found in their 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 been recognized by numerous awards and publications, including a P/A Award, and a Design Vanguard award from Architectural Record. 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 widely, including 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 Visiting Lecturer at the Princeton SoA.