Brendan Sullivan Shea is an architectural designer, educator, and author. He is a co-founder of Roundhouse, a curatorial platform dedicated to investigating cycles of change in architectural production and the perception, documentation, and preservation of site-specific histories. Its workshops, curatorial projects, and urban labs have been supported by Arcosanti, Iowa Lakeside Lab, Oakes Creek Ranch, LA as Subject, USC Special Collections, WuHo, and Wikipedia.
He is currently working on a collection of architectural prototypes that intersect natural earthen materials with additive digital fabrication technologies, invent new ways to build low-cost/low-carbon objects and buildings, and create a community-based working method to enable participatory architectural work on a variety of scales.
Shea was awarded a research residency in Spain, Poland, and Germany by onEarth Foundation in 2022 and will be in residence at Villa Empain in Belgium in 2023.
During his MacDowell Fellowship, Brendan produced a series of algorithms, drawings, and reclaimed clay and recyclable plastic objects for his ongoing project, “From the Ground Up.” Previous prototyping for the project took place in 2021 during a research fellowship in Arcosanti, Arizona.
