Camille McGriff

Architecture, Writing, Research

Find studio projects, sketches, and writing that traverses the divides of genres, disciplines, and representation.

Housing in a Mass Timber Armature

Creating a jungle-gym spatial imaginary for possibility and user self-determination in design, apartments grow into a mass-timber armature in Harlem as residents drive an evolving scheme through time. Within the mass timber armature are proposed nodes for spatial programming, connection, and experimental co-living apartments

Architect Deborah Berke Talks About Seaside’s Evolution

While working for the Seaside Institute in the summer of 2021 I wrote a series of articles and interviews on the effects of New Urbanism in the late twentieth century, and the contemporary role it can play in shaping cities and addressing the issues of the built environment today.

Deepwater Horizon

Using the architectural forms and building narrative of Deepwater Horizon, I explored various modes of architectural drawing and representation through drawing, model-making, book-making, video essay, and animation.

Systems and Connections

Ink and gouache strike radiant patterns across the page, layered heavily over varying time continuums. This triptych seeks to connect contentious, electric systems that operate parallel yet in tandem to one another.

Palimpsests and Erasures

Engaging with collage and erasure as a way to bring alternate histories and past perspectives to the fore, this series investigated a series of analog, digital, and written representational tactics.

Jazzland!

With a prompt to examine systems of damage and damage control, the project is a multidisciplinary approach to architecture, climate change, mythology, indigenous land loss, and fossil fuels. Investigating land loss due to climate change in Southern Louisiana while mapping placemaking strategies and mythological places through critical cartography and lyric essay, the project investigates sites of mythological memory as proposals for housing climate refugees.

“Indeed With Everything All At Once”: Charles Moore and the Enactment of Place

When space contained by and enabled by architecture is enacted by humans, we can begin to question what architecture actually is. When we align our definition of architecture with the enactment of rhetorical space, it is evident that architecture seeps into every aspect of the world manifested, crafted, and perceived by humans.

Salut Modernistes! The Riviera Portfolio

Combining writing a novel with a research study on ekphrasis, the literary device of imbuing visual art with the transient, ephemeral emotional qualities of written experience, I wrote a full-length novel about the architecture and Modern art of the museums on the French Riviera, centering on a curator at the Fondation Maeght in Saint Paul-de-Vence, France. I received a grant to travel to Palma de Mallorca and Malaga for research at the Taller Sert and Museo Picasso, respectively.

Adjectival Structures Claim the Future in the Futurist Manifesto

This grammatical analysis breaks down how adjectival structures are deployed in long metaphor, thus crafting a convincing rhetoric that started Modernism.

From Prison Farm to Table

This guerilla-style exhibit intervening through the center of Wall Street acts as a strategy of increasing visibility around infrastructures that are tied to the carceral landscape. The machine is designed to simulate the movement of a carrot from harvest on a prison farm to a public school lunch tray, where it is consumed as a baby carrot.

Sketchbook

Sketching is a multidisciplinary practice of drawing, writing, and collage—a survey of human, architectural, and urban conditions.

GULF! Magazine

I wrote, designed, and edited the 52-page publication GULF! Magazine, including columns, features, editorials, photography, graphic design, and advertising design. The publication explored community and identity in the Gulf Coast region through food, culture, travel, and editorials.

Gymnasium for Utopia

A pandemic-era studio project that tasked students to envision an architecture for utopia led me to reconsider the classical typology of the gymnasium as a place for academic and athletic engagement in a new commons.