This New York City firm harnesses design for positive community engagement The financial crisis of 2008 pummeled many an industry, architecture included. Yet it was just around that time, when new work was hard to come by, that newlyweds and Princeton-trained architects Emily Abruzzo and Gerald Bodziak launched their own design practice in Brooklyn, New York.
It sounds counterintuitive?or, in Abruzzo?s words, like ?the worst possible time??but this fact has always been central to the studio?s modus operandi.
What defines this ?generation? of post-recession firms, according to Abruzzo and Bodziak, is a proactive quality and a sobriety that pre-2008 firms didn?t tend to?or need to?have.

Naho Kubota
Landscape (Triptych), an installation for New York Center for Architecture?s street-facing gallery, uses technical rope and energy-efficient electroluminescent wire to create a ?sketch in light??a nod to neon lights found on neighboring storefronts.
?There was an economy of means, certainly,? Abruzzo says. ?But there was also this idea of creating projects?self-initiated work?and not waiting for the traditional relationship of a client coming to you to start a project.?
Perhaps that?s why the duo didn?t grow their practice from doing, say, a bunch of small-scale home renovations. Instead, Abruzzo Bodziak has continually taken on civic projects, particularly ones with great potential for positive community engagement.
An early project, Grow A Lot...