lauren mcclellan

Lauren McClellan (Alex House 07) is an architect based in Brooklyn who recently founded her own practice, Threshold Office. At Brentwood, you could often find her in the art studio, painting and drawing. In the classroom, she gravitated towards maths and sciences with Tate, Crossley, Snow and Pennells. She sought a career that could bring these seemingly divergent interests together.

This led her to the halls of MIT where she studied architecture and engineering with a focus on structures. There is a common expression at MIT that the experience is much like trying to drink from a fire hose. She found it was her passion for architecture that kept her from drowning in it all. With her degrees finally tucked under her arm, perhaps still a bit damp, she walked down the street and started a Masters of Architecture at Harvard.

Her first long term work experience started in the basement lab of MIT’s civil engineering department, studying how concrete behaves. From there she leaned into the poetic world of design, working on art/architecture installations, such as a screen of small wind turbines that glow in the wind or a series of chairs that respond to touch. Then she moved to the MIT Media Lab’s Mediated Matter Group to explore materials, nature and computation as one. While at Harvard she worked as a CNC mill teaching assistant, digitally carving solid materials layer by layer into building and landscape models.

Outside the academic realm, her architecture focus shifted back and forth in scale. At the larger scale, she shaped super tall towers at firms in Chicago, and at the smaller boutique scale, she contributed to designs for Aesop and MoMA PS1 competitions. Finally finished with her education, she made a geographic leap to NY to work for Harvard’s Director of Architecture, designing architecture installations and award-winning residences. There she learned to nurture and focus her creative intuition and harness the delightfully absurd.

Find Lauren on Brentonian Connect.

Additional Links

Royal Architectural Institute of Canada

The American Institute of Architects

Harvard Graduate School of Design

Threshold Office