Pushing Boundaries: Ryan Brooke Thomas on Collective Knowledge, Cooperative Models, and Cumulative Meanings
Portrait by Jonathan Hokklo
Ryan Brooke Thomas is principal of Kalos Eidos, a New York-based design studio whose approach overlaps a foundation in architecture with other modes of design, creative practice and cultural research. Ryan is a founding member of WIP Collaborative, a feminist collective and shared design practice with a focus on the public realm. She’s also co-chair of AIANY’s New Practices Committee and a design professor, currently teaching architecture studio at The Cooper Union.
In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Ryan talks about the multifaceted accumulation of experiences that informs her practice and teaching, advising those just starting their careers to follow their curiosities and refresh their perspectives.
Tell me about your foundational years - where did you grow up and what did you like to do as a kid?
I’m originally from the Midwest and grew up predominantly in St. Louis, Missouri. As a kid, the creative activities I enjoyed most — like drawing intricate patterns, making hand-bound books, or re-working vintage clothes—mostly required skills of precision, assembly and craft. But in terms of school classes, I liked philosophy and math most of all — subjects that were inherently more abstract and related to systems of meaning. I also loved rearranging my bedroom and “designing” it through different configurations of objects or color schemes, reorganizing what went where and trying to reinvent the small space into something new with new adaptations. Looking back at it now, I can see how that combination of interests probably helped connect me to architecture as a good fit; but it wasn’t something I ever thought about as a possibility until the very end of my college years.
I earned my undergraduate degree at Stanford in Modern Thought & Literature, an interdisciplinary degree in the Humanities department that was centered around critical theory, philosophy, literature and the arts, all through the lens of modernism. In my last year, I took two art history courses focused on architecture, which I’d never really explored or studied before. In some ways, I’d never really even looked at the built environment inquisitively or with any deep curiosity. Perhaps that was because I grew up in the suburban sprawl of mid-America in the ‘80s and ‘90s, or perhaps because I never considered the field extended beyond a highly technical, engineering-driven type of pursuit. But these courses introduced architecture in a way that gave it legibility within a diverse context of meaning, design intent and interconnectedness to the structure of cities and society.
View across XSmall, an interior renovation and living space in Brooklyn, NY. Photography by Steve Freihon.
Studio and retail space for apparel brand Ilana Kohn in Manhattan, NY. Photography by Steve Freihon.
How did you get your start in architecture?
Following that spark of curiosity, I applied last-minute to a summer architecture introduction program at Columbia’s GSAPP that offered a preview of what a Master’s degree would be like. The program was really stimulating and eye-opening in revealing that design could be both intellectual but also about craft. At that point, in identifying architecture as something to study, I liked that multiple paths were possible and one could potentially blend academia with creative practice and a professional skill set. I decided to return to California to attend UCLA for my Master’s, intrigued by the diversity of the urban landscape in Los Angeles and drawn to the mix of thought leaders like Sylvia Lavin and Bob Somol who were shaping the critical conversation at the school at the time in unique ways that differentiated the program.
After completing my Masters, I started working in Los Angeles, but soon became excited by a handful of newer multidisciplinary design practices in New York that were overlapping architecture with interior design, brand identity and strategy, and focused on creating environments that played out across multiple scales and modalities. I decided to follow my intuition and move to New York, taking a position with AvroKO, whose approach really resonated with me. During my time there, the office was growing and expanding rapidly, developing a new model of practice that hybridized different design scales and points of reference. As the office evolved, I helped shape it along the way, while my skill set and perspective grew as well.
My experience there started to crystallize my broader career focus for the future, seeing architecture in a way that was less centered around the idea of buildings as objects, but rather as multi-faceted environments in which form and content were both critical ingredients. It also planted the seed in my mind that I wanted to explore those ideas more, and apply them in a different way — extend this approach outside of the hospitality realm of projects that AvroKO focused on, and spin it through my own areas of interest and objectives for design. It was the first time I really started to dream about having my own practice one day and could identify some of the key ingredients that would give it direction and purpose.
“Another way to counter the challenges comes through camaraderie with other designers...I rarely have a sense of being in competition with other offices; instead I’ve seen that the more we offer support to one another, the more that support circles back.”
How did you start Kalos Eidos?
I continued to work in several leadership roles at other studios in New York for a number of years before deciding to take the leap and start my own practice. After AvroKO, I joined a good friend and former classmate from UCLA who had recently launched a new practice in New York, Architecture at Large, and helped lead and grow the studio as Design Director in its early years. That experience gave me a kind of “trial run” in directing a small office while, at the same time, I also got my first teaching position as a studio design professor at Syracuse.
Then another exciting opportunity arose and I joined the design agency 2x4 as Director of Architectural Design, leading an internal studio as part of the multidisciplinary firm. It was a challenging but also transformative role for me, leading a diverse range of project types that took me all over the world – ranging from ambitious interior complexes for Hyundai in Moscow and Beijing, to immersive temporary installations for Arper and Google, to the novelty of designing a new perfume bottle for Prada. The majority of this work involved deep engagement and collaborative design with architects, graphic designers, creative strategists and other niche experts, in order to blend design strategy, branding, graphic and interactive design to integrate seamlessly with the design of spaces.
After several years at 2x4, I made the big decision to break out on my own and launched Kalos Eidos in 2017. Transitioning out of these earlier roles, where the lens through which I understood design was both expanded and sharpened to incorporate a unique mix of inputs, process techniques and frameworks for understanding the built environment, I felt inspired to form a practice where that approach could be applied and adapted in new ways. I was excited to focus design attention in New York specifically, but I also wanted the chance to work on a different array of programmatic and spatial types, like living and civic spaces, where the factors for design thinking would center around people, activities and conditions, and draw from a different set of priorities and outcomes than I’d worked with before in commercial and institutional-oriented projects and clients.
WIP Collaborative public plaza installation, Tidal Shift, for The Shed in Manhattan, NY. Photography by Michael Vahrenwald.
What are you focused on these days?
Ultimately, seeking out that variety of project types and avoiding a single sector of clientele or niche expertise remains important to me. Through Kalos Eidos, we work a lot in New York, having recently completed a retail shop for an apparel brand, a shared workspace for a literary foundation, as well as a number of detail-oriented and comprehensive residential renovations. We’ve also done work outside of NYC, predominantly on the West Coast, and are currently finishing up a single-family residence in Oakland. It’s been refreshing to work along both coasts because each locale presents so many different and distinctive inputs to inform the design, from materials to lifestyle patterns to climate and environmental factors to the character and rhythm of the structures and landscape nearby.
In 2020, together with six other independent design professionals, I became a founding member of WIP Collaborative, a shared feminist design practice centered around communities and the public realm. Our first built project together, Restorative Ground, was a streetscape installation designed to accommodate a range of activities and ways of interacting, presenting a “landscape of choice” that offered an alternate way to experience shared public space in Manhattan. Since then, we’ve worked on more built projects together like a project called “Tidal Shift” in the public plaza at The Shed last summer, as well as speaking engagements, co-teaching initiatives and most recently have kicked off a research project with the Design Trust and in partnership with Verona Carpenter Architects focused around exploring and responding to neurodiversity in the design of public parks, playgrounds and streetscapes.
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
A big challenge in starting a practice is the business side of it and trying to balance everything that encompasses. As architects, we don’t get much training for this and have had so many examples from previous generations that often uphold an inherited mythology rather than transparency about the realities of what practice entails. As younger generations push back to demand changes in the workplace and professionalization of our field, I hope we can also use it as an opportunity to be more open about the challenges that almost all practicing designers face in order to make calls for more systematic support throughout the professional field more broadly.
Another way to counter the challenges comes through camaraderie with other designers like my collaborative partners in WIP Collaborative and also through the network of small, young firms connected through New Practices at the Center for Architecture, where we’ve aimed to cultivate a community to brainstorm opportunities, share resources, and offer advice. Through this, I rarely have a sense of being in competition with other offices; instead I’ve seen that the more we offer support to one another, the more that support circles back.
“Know that a rewarding, robust career may not all happen at one moment in time, or emerge out of one role...I’ve learned that it’s the cumulative value of working in different contexts and playing different roles that has led to the greatest degree of external impact and internal satisfaction.”
What have you also learned in the last six months? What are you most excited about right now?
Along those lines, I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of collective knowledge and how more coordinated efforts in sharing of resources and information can be transformative — whether practical and about practice-oriented needs or more research related, in keeping lineages of work and knowledge alive and passed on to better connect past and future generations.
I think there’s also untapped possibility in considering cooperative modes of practice that could still enable individuals or separate entities to shine and thrive independently not in spite of, but because of, their commitment to a community of peers. Even so, but there’s much more along these lines to explore, and others who are exploring it to different ends. Intuitively, it seems clear that creating more opportunities for shared resources, banks of knowledge, and other outlets of mutual support within our discipline can help the field to be more intergenerational and intersectional. I’m excited about where those possibilities could lead.
Who are you admiring now and why?
I’m really impressed by Sean Canty’s work, which is very rooted in geometry, formalism and typology, but breathes nuance and fresh meaning to what form and abstraction can signify and prompt including aspects of social interaction, memory, and cultural awareness. The work of my collaborative partner from WIP, Bryony Roberts, also explores these ideas, but in a really different way, starting first with research and communication directly with communities and then developing form and materiality to support those goals, often weaving together shapes, colors and textures that aren’t typically found in public spaces or built structures. There are also so many great, newer landscape design practices who contend with similar overlaps, but using an entirely different medium and context for their work. Right now, I’m a big fan of Studio Zewde and also Terremoto, to name a couple.
There are of course inspiring figures from the past too, but one I look back to again and again is Lina Bo Bardi whose projects operate across a range of scales simultaneously, allowing for both subtle prompts for and a sense of intimacy, as well as a kind of bold and empathic presence of building as urban-scale forms. In this way they act as magnets for social interaction or cultural organizers.
Detail interventions from a residential renovation, Crossfold Loft, in Brooklyn, NY. Photography by Steve Freihon.
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
Even since my early days in architecture school, I’ve always sought ways to situate my work at the edges of the discipline’s stereotypical purview, and have been most inspired by design outcomes that overlap architecture with other fields of research and creative practice. Nonetheless, architecture remains my “home base” of knowledge and the realm in which I aspire to contribute to new possible futures. With that, one component of my core mission stays tethered to this field and an ambition to participate actively in pushing it at its boundaries in productive ways — and in discovering new forms and methodologies for doing so — whether through practice, teaching, research or advocacy.
In terms of the impact of the work we create as designers out in the world at large, I think it's crucial to calibrate design in anticipation of active engagement — that it’s open to being programmable, open to being interpreted in its use, open to phase change over time. This means approaching projects as layered, dynamic, multi-scalar and experiential environments, and designing in a way that synthesizes multiple inputs in order to prompt meaningful interaction between humans, objects, space and material effects.
In that sense, identifying the measures of success is necessarily cumulative and often shows up in multiple forms. Internally and in dialogue with other designers, it can come from a shared recognition of coherence in the design work we create. But also, importantly, it shows up in anecdotes of experience: hearing the way something we’ve designed creates a moment of celebration or connection or surprise or discovery, or stitches a new beat into the rhythm of someone’s everyday routine, or elicits a discrete resonance through the atmosphere or effects felt through a project.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
First, listen to your curiosities and let them lead you to unexpected, less-than-obvious destinations. You may not find an exact mold or model for how your interests fit within the field, but if you have the appetite to pursue something meaningful to you, do it. Many of the biggest creative and professional opportunities come not just from focus but also, and maybe more importantly, from adaptability and refreshed perspectives.
Also, know that a rewarding, robust career may not all happen at one moment in time, or emerge out of one role, and that's okay. As my career has evolved, I’ve learned that it’s the cumulative value of working in different contexts and playing different roles that has led to the greatest degree of external impact and internal satisfaction. When there’s a feedback loop between teaching and practice, independent work and collaboration, business and creativity, it’s the resonance across all of those things that brings more meaning than anyone would be capable of yielding on its own.
Lastly, being an advocate is an important role to play in your career. Whether it’s about steering yourself toward new opportunities, positioning yourself for a new role, or looking out for your peers, connecting with people older and younger than yourself, and learning from those who build and consult as much as from those who design, effective advocacy is as much about bringing empathy and thoughtfulness to your actions as it is about sometimes standing up and being loud. Both are important.