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This article is part of our series profiling the Architectural League of New York’s 2024 Emerging Voices laureates and appears in the March/April issue of The Architectural League of New York. one. The full list of winners can be found here.
The goal of landscape architecture and urban design firm TEN x TEN is not to learn, but to unlearn. “We want to use unlearning as a positive practice to make people aware of biases and break away from preconceived notions,” said Maura Rockcastle, principal and co-founder of TEN x TEN.
Rockcastle founded the clinic in 2015 with Principal Ross Altheimer, and today they have 18 employees. They began transforming a historic Pittsburgh factory into a high-tech district—the third phase was completed last year—and since then, the practice has expanded nationally and internationally.
An experimental approach allows the company to integrate community needs: cataloging spaces, using clay to give the site a tactile feel, and making cyanotypes are just some of the unconventional methods the company uses to produce innovative, sensitive work. This can be seen in TEN x TEN’s recent design for the Louis B. Miller Memorial Hall and Freedom Garden at Gallaudet University, a hearing-impaired university in Washington, D.C., which commemorates Miller’s 1952 lawsuit filed against the Department of Education in the fight for the rights of black deaf children. The winding sensory garden moves through the five stages of the Black Deaf experience. Co-developers with Deaf Black people have planned benches that would allow users to draw the attention of those sitting on the other end without using their voices, although they have not yet begun construction.
The company’s work structure continues its creative approach. Describing its “flexible flat” model, Rockcastle explains: “On project teams, we have leaders and designers, but people play different roles on different projects. You might be the project leader on one of those projects. , and then a designer on another project.”
Our dream is to champion new types of architectural work and a diverse clientele. As Altheimer puts it, TEN x TEN hopes to “have experiences and knowledge that can be leveraged on behalf of other communities.” In many ways, the approach has already reached its destination.
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