photo credit: Steph Larsen
French 2D is an award-winning Boston studio founded by Jenny French (MArch Harvard GSD, BA Dartmouth) and Anda French, AIA (MArch Princeton, BA Barnard). Their work centers collaboration across multiple scales, from participatory events/installations to urban-scale textiles and buildings for collective living.
French 2D was internationally recognized as a 2023 Finalist for the Architectural Review’s Emerging Award. The firm received a 2020 P/A (Progressive Architecture) Award from Architect Magazine, and a Design Vanguard award from Architectural Record, and has been featured in Domus, Metropolis, The Architect’s Newspaper, and in the solo show “House Clothes” at UMASS Amherst. Anda is a Visiting Lecturer at the Princeton School of Architecture. Jenny is an Assistant Professor in the Practice of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
We work on housing and mixed-use projects with a focus on strange housing types that combine familiar ideas of home with more radical organizations and typologies (see our current cohousing project in greater Boston and our microhousing project recently completed in Boston). We work on civic installations and exhibitions (or sets in the city) that bring people together for familiar rituals in unfamiliar spaces (see our experimental serial dinner-party and our fuzzy bartering environment). Our interest in the hybrid models that exist between practice and academia has been the catalyst for our current involvement in a series of BSA workshops and a symposium we are organizing along with a small group of practitioners and academics, entitled Now Practice Now
Anda French, AIA, NCARB is a partner in French 2D and a Visiting Faculty member at the Princeton School of Architecture.
Anda was the 2022 President of the Boston Society of Architects/AIA, where she has served as Director-at-Large, co-chaired the BSA’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Task Force since 2018, and organized the BSA's Now Practice Now Series, She is a registered Architect in Massachusetts and is NCARB Certified.
Anda received a B.A. in Architecture from Barnard College, Columbia University, and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University. Anda’s teaching and design research has been funded by an Imagining America Grant for Artists and Scholars in Public Life, and she has participated in a variety of panels and symposia on housing, women in design, and practice. She has also taught at Syracuse University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and in the Barnard + Columbia Undergraduate Architecture Program, and in the MIT Department of Architecture.
Jenny French is a partner in French 2D and an Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she has also served as Coordinating Faculty in Architecture for the Design Discovery Program since 2017.
Jenny received a B.A. in Art History and Studio Art from Dartmouth College, and a Master of Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She is a recipient of Harvard's Julia A. Appleton Traveling Fellowship and has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. Jenny has taught at Northeastern University, Tufts University, the Boston Architectural College, and served as a thesis advisor at RISD. Jenny's design research on site visits to unbuilt architecture has been exhibited at the Harvard GSD and is included in the Cornell Journal of Architecture, Issue 10: Spirits.
Collaborators (past & present): Estelle Yoon, Zhao Sheng, Frankie Perone, Yuna Kim, Aaron Smithson, Melodie Sanchez, Isaac Pollan, Diandra Rendradjaja