Innovation and unconventional thinking are both hardwired into Jennifer Siegal’s DNA. This shows in a body of work and research that questions everything, particularly the static, heavy, inflexible architecture that we somehow still expect in a world that is anything but. In 1998, she named her firm Office of Mobile Design (OMD), a nod to her obsession with the transitory.

The firm focuses on “portable, demountable, and relocatable structures,” from homes to schools to stores. Jennifer and her firm have developed a reputation not only for hands-on research, but for rethinking already radical ideas.

She is the winner of the 2016 arcVision Prize – Women and Architecture, an international award to women’s architecture organized by Italcementi. Jennifer earned a master’s degree from SCI-Arc in 1994 and was a 2003 Loeb Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she explored the use of intelligent, kinetic, and lightweight materials.

She was the inaugural Julius Shulman Institute Fellow at Woodbury University, and is presently an adjunct associate professor at the University of Southern California.

Q&A

If you weren’t in the architecture field, what would you be doing?
I would like to own and run a winery and olive orchard in Baja Mexico. I would still want to build experimental architecture just without the codes and limitations.

If we opened your fridge, what would we find?
Almond Milk, Goat Butter, Olives, Mexican Beer

What do you have framed on your wall that means the most to you?
My father, Sydney Siegal’s paintings

What is the first thing you do to procrastinate?
Water my garden.