Lauren Gideonse

Lauren Gideonse is an architect, artist, and researcher based between Cambridge and Danville, VT. She received her Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, following a BFA from the Cooper Union. She has experience in professional practice in New York, Los Angeles, and Cambridge. She has ongoing collaborative research projects with Adriana Giorgis, on building longevity in the US, and Katie Rotman, around sculptures for collective play. In past lives, she has been a museum exhibition designer, a master papermaker, a waitress, a graphic designer, in publishing, an art handler, and an architectural fabricator. She loves a good road trip and the funny physics of the road runner.

 

In December,  she presented her thesis “Love in the Fast Lane: Not-so-new Models for American Stewardship and Preservation” at the MIT Media Lab. 
In October, she opened an exhibition of ongoing research on the longevity of buildings in America with frequent collaborator Adriana Giorgis, “Come Back and Tell Us Why Things Last” at the Weisner Gallery. 
Summer of 2023, she worked in design and research for the LCAU while conducting thesis work. 

Projects
Marble Wobble
Tilting the Scales, Marble Wobble for Herter Community Garden
Lauren Gideonse and Katie Rotman, second year MArchs at MIT, developed Marble Wobble to direct conversation and gather people around the idea of commoning, group dynamics, and collective and cooperative action. Lauren and Katie have been workshopping a series of games that bring together different stakeholders around these topics.

Marble Wobble: Dudley Triangle, developed for Ana Miljacki’s Collective Studio, is set in Dudley Triangle, home to DNI, a community land trust in Roxbury, Boston. The game highlights the challenges, pitfalls and thrills of working as a collective. There are four playing modes: collectively toward a common goal, together against a common adversary, competitively or contemplatively.

Tilting the Scales, the second in the series of wobbles, was developed for Gediminas Urbonas' course Art in the Public Sphere which had as its site Herter Park Community Garden. This iteration focuses on the cadence of gardening formed by individual labor toward the care of a shared space. The rhythms of gameplay demonstrate the dynamics between advocates for the community garden and larger city bureaucracies as they navigate the challenge of shepherding an un-comforming space in the public sphere.