Oluwamayowa Serene Soyannwo

Prior to joining the M.Arch program at MIT, Serene Soyannwo gained her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Architectural Design with a minor in Film Production from the Parsons School of Design in New York City. 

In her endeavours to undertake the concerns of the world, Serene has found herself immersed in the scope of possibilities which research, theory, and realistic problem solving can ignite in the design process. From proposing the adaptive reuse of Hudson River State Psychiatric Hospital as a Reintegration Centre to support ex-prisoners from Duchess County Jail, to submitting a competition entry for a self-built Education Centre that could shelter a Non-Profit school and its primary level students in Busua, Ghana, her ideologies have undeniably propelled her to think about global complexities with a reflective curiosity and a thorough sensitivity.

In addition to her queries concerning global humanitarian and ecological problems, the question she hopes to find answers to while studying architecture at MIT is learning how one can seamlessly hybridise the abstract and the technical through new and sustainable methodologies - objectives in the industry which often feel at odds when projects must adhere to economic constraints. From her experiences living and working in Nigeria, a place with discouraging levels of inequality, she sees yet still the potential that the built environment holds to be transformed in this essential way that architecture (as with many other creative disciplines) tends to revolutionise. Ultimately, her hope is to expand on such aforementioned principles and innovations in order to better the conditions of sectors in the world that tend to be overlooked.