Getting Things Built: Sage and Coombe Architects’ Jennifer Sage on the Importance of Public Architecture, the Practical Value of Design, and Elevating the Ordinary
Jennifer’s portrait by Alexa Hoyer.
By Gail Kutac
Jennifer Sage, a native New Yorker, has practiced architecture for more than three decades on various public, private, and commercial projects. Together with Peter Coombe, Sage and Coombe Architects focuses on social infrastructure, completing projects ranging from the multiphase transformation of the Noguchi Museum to the Rockaway's reconstruction efforts post-Hurricane Sandy with the Mayor's Office. Jennifer was recognized with the 2021 AIA Award for Excellence in Public Architecture for her work as an " activist for public works." She serves on the board of the Center for Architecture and as co-chair of the Exhibitions Committee; from 2015 to 2019, she was the Vice President for Design Excellence on the board of the New York Chapter of the AIA.
GK: How did your interest in architecture first develop?
JS: I did grow up in the city [NYC] and I certainly grew up playing with blocks. But I don’t think I knew any architects growing up. I’m not one of those people that always knew that they would be an architect. I always thought I would be an art historian and I wrote my college thesis in history. For high school I went to La Guardia - I thought I would go to the Cooper Union for painting. The thing that kind of clinched it for me was finding something that I didn’t mind staying up all night doing. It was a funny kind of visceral realization, “Ok, this is me.”
What did you learn about yourself while pursuing an architectural degree?
I learned that I wanted to make spaces and to think about the materiality of things. Also, the conversation that you get into with critics, studio-mates….is what I found at Yale – and learning from other people. I loved studio life, and happily, that has carried forward into office life, being able to exchange ideas and test things out, turn them upside down. In that sense, my background in drawing and art was helpful because I was very comfortable doing that kind of thing, I just didn’t have a sense of how to build anything, so it took me a while to catch up to everyone coming out of B. Arch programs.
Concert stage at Riverfront Park, Wilmington, NC. Photography by David Hess.
Ocean Breeze Athletic Complex, Staten Island, NY. Photography by Paul Warchol.
New York Public Library Fort Washington Reading Room. Photography by Chuck Choi.
So you’ve made it through architecture school, now how did you get your start in the field?
Before I went to graduate school, I worked in an office where I met Steve Holl, who had just moved to New York. I started working for him at night and we did Pamphlet Architecture and various other things. So that was my first taste of practice. He was old friends with Mark Mack and Leb Woods and we would hear stories of Bill Stout, so it was a whole moment that I got introduced to, and this idea that you can make architecture and not be in a big corporate environment, that it can kind of be your “mad” thing that you do. So that was probably what kicked me into graduate school.
After that, one summer I went to Vienna and worked for Hans Hollein. One of my critics arranged it, and it was pretty great. The office was more like a studio, so it was again a clear reinforcement of how I was already learning to work.
I went to the I.M.Pei office, pretty much right after graduate school, and worked there on a number of projects. That was a really great education in how to build - not always things that I wanted to build - but the expertise in that office was pretty amazing. I worked there for two or three years and then I quit to go teach in Rome, and I spent three years teaching for Catholic University and RISD, mostly the Spring honors studios. I was kind of living in Paris working in a chambre de bonne as a studio, but I realized that I wanted a little more architectural community. I didn’t have enough going on. I walked into the Louvre office [of I.M. Pei & Partners] because they all knew me, and for that reason, I was also useful. So that was an incredible few years, watching the Louvre get built. It put me back into the office and sometimes when you quit and you refresh your relationships, you turn into a new person for some people. That was a great experience and a great construction site. There’s really nothing like building and watching things take shape.
Eventually, I moved back to New York and went back to the I.M. Pei office [soon to be Pei Cobb Freed], and they were always very generous with me. They bumped me up and gave me incredible opportunities and I worked there pretty much until I went out on my own. I saw the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame project through - again, not really my project but it was a great experience. They used to call me I.M. in drag [laughs]. I would show up for those meetings - it was just a very different world then - I’d be the only woman in the room. Turner would think I was there for the interiors. It was just a different moment, but I think it’s a little better now.
“You need critical mass to make our community secure and desirable. You need to make people feel at home, and it’s hard if they’re the only one there.”
What sparked the move away from I.M. Pei the first time, to teach?
The chance to teach. I think I always had a slightly academic side to me - I had majored in medieval church history. I had this art and architectural historical background, so it was really fun to teach those studios - you know, doing a project based on Hadrian’s Villa. There were such great conversations and there were a lot of people teaching in Rome in those years, probably still are, so it was like a slightly competitive seminar we’d have with each other. It was a fun scene, and the kids were great. This was all pre-CAD, so there was a lot of drawing, a lot of sketching - it doesn’t seem that long ago, but I guess it was [laughs].
When you were ready to start your own practice, how did that get off the ground? How did you know Peter Coombe?
I knew Peter because he lived with one of my classmates at Yale when I was at graduate school. Peter went off to the GSD and eventually we both ended up in New York, but he was at Meier’s office, and I was at Pei’s office. It partly just happened because we were at the same stage at the same time - we actually had a third partner at that point, Ross Weimer, but he never quite disconnected himself from his professional life at a point when it made sense for him to jump over. For a while, it was a nighttime operation. I think we were both just ready to leave our corporate lives and have control over things. There was a long period of just doing anything, but it still felt better. I’ve always said to people, “It’s much easier to scale down than to scale up.”
The Noguchi Museum. Photography by Peter Aaron.
The Noguchi Museum. Photography by Peter Aaron.
After you started teaming up as a nighttime operation, how long was it before you were fully running your own firm?
We were doing the night stuff not that long, a couple of years, the late-1990s. I think I saw Rock & Roll finish and that’s when we started the firm officially. We didn’t start with any big jobs, we didn’t run off with I.M.’s next big commission or Richard’s museum [laughs]. We were surviving on little things, did some residential work, we were basically just working in New York.
The big change happened when Bloomberg came in [as mayor] and he started the idea of Design Excellence. I don’t even know how public work was doled out before this! This new world was based on the idea that the city prequalifies you - the first group was 24 firms for DDC [Department of Design and Construction]. We got on that list, based on our portfolio, and then rolled into the process of just competing against each other for jobs. It was really kind of amazing. There was plenty of work to go around. That administration cared about the quality of public life and public architecture - they believed in design, and they attracted a lot of people into the administration who also cared about it. So that really changed the trajectory of our practice - I suppose we could have been doing houses for the rich and famous by now otherwise, but we ended up going on this path [public work]. They’re not easy projects because they don’t have fat budgets and the schedules are torturous - it’s a bear of an equation. But on the other hand, you get smart, and you figure out where to spend the money you have. There’s a lot of self-editing that goes into public work. Also true, that it was a very heady time with the Public Design Commission and there was a lot of enthusiasm. PDC had Jim Polshek, Paula Scher, Guy Nordenson, and Signe Nielsen, among others - it was always an interesting conversation when you got up in front of them.
The design intelligentsia of New York City!
Yes, exactly! I know it was hard sometimes, and maybe some people didn’t enjoy those tussles as much as we did, but it was a real conversation. For me, it was a period when the intention to make strong and inspiring public architecture was very present. In a parallel world, without thinking about it, we did other civic work - we did the Noguchi Museum which we began in the late 1990s. It started out as a very modest project to help them legalize their three buildings. Tod Williams and Billie Tsien had just done the master plan and they said, “Why don’t you ask these guys [Sage and Coombe] to help you.” So, one thing turned into another, and we are forever grateful of course!
“I do think that the women of the profession have been really a great resource for each other. From being the only woman in the room to having a real community has been an astounding and inspiring evolution.”
Wow, that’s a beautiful place.
It was a real labor of love because it was about looking like we had never been there. It was impossible because of course we radically transformed the place! But we worked to preserve the karma and the feeling of the place, and somehow people forgot how much we had changed.
That’s amazing, and what an incredible project to work on as you were establishing your firm. Where are you in your career today? I saw that you recently won a big award from the AIA for your work in the civic realm.
Yes, that was very exciting. Honestly and obviously, it’s an honor I share with Peter and the whole office, as we all know, it’s one of those funny things about how the world works - but it is so nice that the work is recognized. It’s a drum we’ve been beating – that public work is of critical importance – but it’s been hard in the last few years because there’s not a lot of NYC administrative support for it. Maybe that will change again.
Do you think NYC’s shift to design-build for civic work will change anything?
We’ll see, there’s hope! I think there are a lot of kinks to work out because obviously, every architect fears losing control of what’s important or fears that in an effort to make the budget, the builder will make their own value engineering decisions. There’s a lot of trust or contractual arrangement that really needs to be put in place.
What have been some of the biggest challenges in your career?
Learning how to be flexible. You come out of graduate school, and you are very high-minded about what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s good and what’s bad. The reality is that you have to work with people, so those are big lessons that you’re going to learn if you’re going to get projects built, especially in the public realm where you don’t have a super flexible and well-funded client. I watch people in the office manage that balancing act while we all fight to hold onto the big ideas that are essential to what the project needs or should be.
Also, since I’m speaking to Madame Architect, I do think that the women of the profession have been really a great resource for each other. From being the only woman in the room to having a real community has been an astounding and inspiring evolution.
Rockaway Beach Open-Up. Photography by Alexa Hoyer.
Greater Newark Conservancy. Photography by Alexa Hoye.
Jennifer and the Mayor of Newark Ras Baraka at the Mulberry Commons Project. Photography by Peter Coombe.
As you were coming of age in the profession, were there any women that you looked up to, or that could go to as a mentor, in either a formal or informal way?
There were women in practice, and they were ahead of me, but not many. I was near the beginning of a big wave of younger women coming into the profession. That’s how I feel, I don’t know if that’s really true! But the change over the last twenty years, in terms of women in positions of authority - I think our office is over 70% women. Someone once said, “Oh your office is so great, it has so many women,” and Peter and I looked at each other like, “That’s interesting…” [laughs] because we hadn’t intentionally done that. Over the last couple of years, we have been much more conscious of our own process and thinking about getting these doors open in a way that they haven’t been open before to more people of more varieties. You need critical mass to make our community secure and desirable. You need to make people feel at home, and it’s hard if they’re the only one there.
What have been some of the biggest highlights for you?
Honestly, just getting things built. You see a lot of projects that wither, that don’t get funded, or get sidelined for any number of reasons. It’s a challenge to build well and each time it’s just thrilling. Even when it just starts construction, it’s so great! A lot of clients don’t really know what an architect can offer for them and think that it probably is a waste of money. But there are clients who just really like the process and can’t wait to see what you’re going to do, and that is also a fantastic thing. It’s also quite interesting to watch your projects age well and adapt to new lives.
Our Newark project, which we competed for over months and were sure we would never get – we had to do five interviews by the time we received a go-ahead – and that was incredible. It is a kind of urban green space and we thought well, this is not in our wheelhouse but we’re going to do it anyway. The phase two scope – a pedestrian bridge over the Northeast Corridor, a new Train Hall and connections to Newark Penn Station – was big and bold and we also had our doubts about that going ahead. And now it is. It’s evidence to me that an ambitious design can spur action. Sometimes you make a scheme, and it really catches people and gets them excited, and they begin to realize it is possible to change the world and create a whole new view of something otherwise so familiar.
That’s inspiring. Who are you admiring right now and why?
My greatest admiration – and some relief – is for the re-education we’re all going through. It’s not about us, but it’s about taking on our shared responsibilities to social justice and environmental action. Sage and Coombe has joined the AIA 2030 Commitment and we have a terrific team in the office working to elevate and advance our existing sustainable practice. We’re all admitting how narrow our views have been. Good public buildings and spaces can and should enhance and reinforce the values of each community.
We are all testing ourselves and trying to move outside our current skins. I feel particularly aware of this as a board member of the Center for Architecture, a place that really has the power to bridge some of these gaps. We have to open the doors to talk about the polyvalence of architecture and how it is not a trade that serves only members of some narrowly defined club. I guess I feel that we can bring in new voices, reach a broader audience, and as an architect, help people understand what the practical value of design can be and how it can elevate daily life and help to sustain the environment. I feel hopeful for the first time in a while about that.
At the Center for Architecture, we spent a good part of last year in the Program Committee discussing how to open the Center to a much broader conversation, and more people, and more groups. The question was, maybe it’s time to stop “curating” shows? We have this big platform, and we could offer the platform up to other groups and entities and younger people to take it over. Why not just open the doors? We started the Center for Architecture Lab “residency”, starting with a digital interface and two incredible partners (Indigenous Scholars of Architecture and Community Design Collaborative), and we’re hoping to later have a physical presence – an event, or a show, or something beyond what we can conceive. It has tremendous potential to break down the old and bring in something new. We are not there yet but it’s in the works.
That’s great, to use the platform not just to navel-gaze and talk about what’s important amongst ourselves, but to allow someone else to step in and take advantage of the visibility it offers.
Yes, and it’s never been evil, but the vision needs to be sharpened, even as well-intentioned as it has been. The CFA also does amazing K-12 programming to bring architecture into the schools and a lot of good stuff comes out of there. But now we see there are other opportunities that took us a while to shake loose. The ability to step back and turn something upside down is the only hope. I think a lot of people are having those moments right now and I admire that.
“We have to open the doors to talk about the polyvalence of architecture and how it is not a trade that serves only members of some narrowly defined club.”
On a related note, what is the impact you’d like to have in or on the world?
My core mission is to make more and better architecture. I want to try to enlighten people about what architecture can do and to create inspired spaces: by elevating the ordinary, sometimes breaking the rules, and maybe seeing your work as part of a bigger mission. We used to talk about our work as “clonal colonies” when we were doing a lot of smaller public projects. We were designing 26 small buildings to house wellheads for the groundwater system, which sadly was not built, but it was a great project. We began to map all of these projects and we thought, even if these jobs are little, we could create this landscape of better public architecture, and create this kind of self-generating colony of like-projects creating a critical mass of good design.
I’m still an architect and so the pleasure is in imagining the project and figuring out what it’s made of, how it relates to what’s around it, and nowadays, trying to be as efficient and sustainable as possible. We’re doing our first all-electric building right now for a new library and that’s going to be just amazing. Just getting over each hump makes me want to keep going. We’ve got three people in the office who are Passivhaus certified, and having that intelligence is important, we want them to start applying it to everything we’re doing – which is not totally possible – but the more you can push the envelope, the better.
What advice do you have for someone starting their career, and would that advice be any different for women?
I think people starting their careers should do as many things as possible, get as many experiences as possible. Don’t go after money because it’s never going to be there anyway [laughs]! Get the most interesting job you can, work for big and small firms, travel, explore, and stay open. Some of our best people didn’t come out of narrow architectural training and were great because they had other experiences and brought different things to the conversation.
Women are doing much better than they were when I started out. So, I think it’s less of a hurdle for us and that’s great. We need to take advantage of opportunities, take risks and be ambitious. And don’t dwell on the downside. The community of women architects has been generous and supportive of each other, and we must continue to do that as we gain opportunities and professional strength. And most important maybe, we have to encourage others outside our little circles to join us.