Believing that the architect’s role is to test and expand the boundaries of reality, Marshall Brown’s projects give form to the interactions between architecture, power, and acts of world making. Brown moves between various scales of architecture and diverse conceptual frameworks, embodying new relationships between the one and the many. Invested in the material history of architecture, he constructs visions of urban worlds yet to come using collage, architectural drawings on drafting vellum, sketches on tracing paper, video, models, objects, and built projects.
In a recent project—The New Country—Brown uses multi-disciplinary speculative architectural fiction to offer progressive visions of a boundless and radically American civilization; looking beyond our present moment of environmental crisis and social isolation, he proposes a future aimed at social ownership and collective independence. Architectural drawings on drafting vellum, sketches on tracing paper, wooden scale models, and videos come together to convey Brown’s rejection of purist or reductionist worldviews through novel hybrids. The Dequindre Civic Academy, a 3 million square foot citadel for the children of Detroit, was featured in “The Architectural Imagination” at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale and was acquired by the The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. That same year, his Ziggurat garden folly was commissioned by the Arts Club of Chicago, drawing from the architecture of Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, and Zaha Hadid.
Brown’s recent collages sample from the history of modern and contemporary architecture to create new forms of monumentality. Crossing disciplinary boundaries and extending from the intertwined histories of modern art and architecture, his collages create new connections, associations, and meanings among disconnected architectural and urban remnants. Brown dissects imagery from photographs taken during the golden age of post-war architectural photography, using the historically disruptive properties of collage and montage to create new forms, spaces, and narratives. His curated fragments–culled from monographs on significant figures from the history of architectural photography–are hand-cut and fused together onto Arches hot press watercolour paper. Looming facades, stark shadows, and structural details support one another to form unique architectural spaces and narratives — offering no site or function, Brown’s assemblages look toward new, boundless spaces.
Marshall Brown is an architect, urbanist, and futurist whose work creates new connections, associations, and meanings among disconnected architectural and urban remnants. His 2022-23 show, The Architecture of Collage at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, was Brown’s first solo museum exhibition and most comprehensive presentation of his collages to date. Works from the show, exploratory essays, and additional pieces are displayed in a book of the same name. Brown’s work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography and the University Club, both in Chicago. Brown has exhibited at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Arts Club of Chicago, the Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles, and in a 10-year survey, Recurrent Visions: The Architecture of Marshall Brown Projects, at the Princeton University School of Architecture. His projects and essays have appeared in several books and journals, including The New York Times Magazine, Metropolis, Crain’s, Architectural Record, Art Papers, The Believer, the Journal of Architectural Education and Log. Marshall Brown received his masters’ degrees at Harvard University. Brown is represented by Western Exhibitions. He is an associate professor with tenure at the Princeton University School of Architecture, where he directs the Princeton Urban Imagination Center. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.