Jennifer Kerr

I became an architect a bit later in life after careers in manufacturing, finance and even enjoyed an apprenticeship in musical instrument making. It is this diverse experience I bring to architecture in which I position myself as an architect, teacher, and researcher. After all, if architecture is to be holistic and integrated then my engagement must support practice, pedagogy, and scholarship. I think about these elements as three legs on a stool capable supporting endeavour in any context on any territory, no matter how uneven, no matter what boundaries we think exist. So, I will often be heard to say, “If you don’t have a life outside of architecture what is it that you are bringing into it?”

Even if people are not conscious of it the built environment is the reality for most people in their everyday lives. Arguably, it comes into being through, is sustained by, and ultimately is dissolved by an ever-changing context of human agendas and natural processes. We humans make our own environment, so it seems rational to me, to want to understand its process and how we attach ourselves to it socially, physically, environmentally and in pretty much any way that humans find meaning and perhaps why my practice and research centres on temporality, queer space, and poetry.

Also, I might be heard saying "architects need to be tall creatures having our head in the clouds and feet on the ground". We have the responsibility to imagine the possibilities and so deliver something that works incredibly well. I try to thread a sense of the real through all my projects always asking how can this work, how can this be made? I am very lucky to be an architect who lives in house of their own design but I set out to do this because I demanded to know the experience of the client – and I’m still living and learning this today.

In my scholarship, I continue to be committed to critical inquiry and social justice, which I believe to be central to academic freedom, and essential if we genuinely want to enable inclusion through the representation of diverse lived experiences.