French 2D
Cover: French 2D | Bay State Cohousing, Malden, MA, 2023. Image credit: Naho Kubota. Video editor: Darlena Chiem
The Architectural League’s biennial Emerging Voices program spotlights North American architects, landscape architects, and urban designers who have significant bodies of realized work and the potential to influence their field.
Anda French and Jenny French of French 2D are 2026 Emerging Voices winners.
Founded in Boston by Anda French and Jenny French in 2012, French 2D’s work spans large-scale multi-family and micro-housing projects, public infrastructure, and cultural institutions. The firm employs what they call “strange housing types” across residential developments and installations, which challenge familiar domestic ideas through radical organizations and typologies. In their own words, French 2D’s work is grounded in “the pursuit of new forms of collective resilience, with a focus on the social consequences of material, thermal, and formal effects.”
Projects include:
Bay State Cohousing, a complex for a self-governed, self-financed, and self-developed community of 30 households that resulted from a participatory design process, with an asymmetrical design that incorporates terraced decks and communal spaces
Dinner Cozy, a 40-foot long tablecloth installation with numerous sewn-on arms that seats up to 28 guests, designed to make visible the social and physical negotiation of dining etiquette and comfort norms
Kengall Square Garage Screens, a graphic facade that wraps around a highly visible Cambridge garage, featuring mesh fabric over a tension frame, as well as a pattern articulated at various scales that plays on architectural detail and shadow effects
French 2D was featured in the 2025 Chicago Architectural Biennial. The firm was nominated for a Mies Crown Hall Americas Award in 2024 and was recognized as a Design Vanguard practice by Architectural Record in 2019.
Anda French is currently a professor of the practice at Princeton University School of Architecture. She holds a master’s of architecture from Princeton University School of Architecture and a bachelor’s of arts from Barnard College.
Jenny French is currently an assistant professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She received a master’s of architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a bachelor’s of arts in art history and studio art from Dartmouth College.
