‘An Educational Environment, Designing Educational Environments’
Catherine Wilmes has spent a lot of time thinking about classrooms. She began her career at Efficiency Lab for Architecture, a Brooklyn-based practice focused largely on schools, where conversations about pedagogy were part of daily work.
“We developed a robust body of research before designing the schools themselves. It was exciting to talk heavily about theory in the office, and see it teased out into, for example, a tangible piece of furniture,” Wilmes laughs. “My work environment almost felt like a school. It was an educational environment designing educational environments.”
In addition to her United States-based projects, Wilmes soon found herself involved in campuses in Brazil and China. In the time of social distancing mandates, she developed a mobile, writable wall system called the “Rolling Y.” She later explored student-led learning environments, replacing front-facing desks in square rooms with continuous, circular seating arrangements. She designed a “movement room”—an open playroom with padded surfaces—that heavily incorporated theories of child movement.
She witnessed other innovations: sky bridges connecting school buildings; centralized outdoor forums to fit a multitude of different student gatherings; glass-encased niches set apart from high-traffic hallways for individual or small workgroups to thrive.
“All of that was useful in how I approach my own practice. It gave me practical grounding—research applied, not abstracted,” Wilmes says.
Creating learning spaces continues to be a research focus for Wilmes, along with architectural pedagogy—how studios are structured, what students are expected to learn, and what they take away. This includes examining the role of media, material assemblies, and technology in shaping architectural thinking, always with an emphasis on helping students build independence and clarity in their design choices.
Wilmes’s most recent project, “Learning on the Line,” explores ideas for improving access to early education on Chicago’s South Side by adapting rail systems: teaching students in train cars with the support of a centralized anchor school. The trains could travel to multiple schools, in addition to visiting cultural institutions across the city.
“I intend to continue developing this kind of public-facing research, where design inquiries about education intersect directly with the city,” Wilmes says.
At the College of Architecture (COA), Wilmes is co-coordinating second-year studios with Associate Teaching Professor Michael Glynn. She is involved with multiple international projects, and intends to conduct a global survey of schools in addition to getting COA students involved in an educational project in Nigeria.
Before coming to the College of Architecture, Wilmes taught architecture at Pratt Institute's Graduate Architecture and Urban Design while working full-time at Efficiency Lab. At Cornell University, she was a visiting critic and later was awarded a design teaching fellowship, leading introductory-level studios as well as advanced seminars in representation and theory. She has exhibited her work in several shows, including Identity Crisis, a solo exhibition in Ithaca, New York, exploring didactic tools in architectural education, and recently curated the symposium SIGHTLINES: Architecture, Photography, and the Mutability of the Image, which explored the relationship between architectural representation and photography.
