Stuckeman student wins thesis prize for exploring gender norms in architecture

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Jenna Folk, who graduated from Penn State on May 4 with her bachelor of architecture in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, was awarded the Department of Architecture’s 2024 Paul M. Kossman Design Thesis Award for her project that investigates the binary experience of a building and space in order to better understand the ways gender norms and binaries are perpetuated through the ways architecture is constructed.  

A native of Allentown, Pennsylvania, Folk said she became more interested in topics of gender, race, sexuality and love after taking several sociology and philosophy classes during her five years at Penn State, thus prompting her to explore how architecture intersects with these topics in her thesis project. 

“I find that understanding the human is essential for the architect because space is inherently linked to human beings,” said Folk. “Since the human cannot fit into the labels and boxes that society has constructed over time — and these labels are linked so strongly to space — a new design process for architecture must be considered.”  

In her project, titled “Blurring Binaries and Bending Gender: An Architecture of Love,” Folk chose to investigate the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia as it is a notable structure and “welcoming icon” to anyone arriving in the city by train or bus. Folk proposes an experiential “queered” space installation on the site that “challenges the well-defined binary space of the station, deconstructing the architecture that forces humans to define themselves within space and creates an architecture of acceptance, reception and love.”  

“A non-binary ambiguity is created, transforming the known identity of the architecture and therefore challenging and redesigning the known identity of the user,” Folk continued.  

Folk said she drew inspiration for her thesis from the work of Cassils and other queer artists and architects who have studied the challenging and changing of gender norms in the built environment, such as Eileen Gray and Dolores Hayden.  

“I also took inspiration from architects who are using materials in new ways to create ambiguous and ethereal spaces, such as the architecture office TAKK and its work on 'The Garden for Romantic Crossovers,'" she said.  

Folk said she hopes that by winning the Kossman Prize, an important message is being heard, questioned and contemplated about how architecture can create boundaries and divisions in society. 

“I hope a broader audience of people will be able to consider and question how gender norms, perceptions and binaries can be perpetuated through the ways we construct architecture,” she said. “Ultimately I hope that an architecture can be created that will blur, bend and distort these boundaries and divisions that we have created over time.” 

Darla Lindberg, professor of architecture and the instructor of the fifth-year thesis studio, said Folk’s project stood out in many ways.  

“Jenna’s willingness to explore materials and push spatial properties to arrive at vibrant new readings of an iconic building typology — the station — challenges traditional identities of what is oddly never permanent (the scene is constantly changing) against what is refreshingly familiar (our shared affinity for the loving embrace or a tearful departure),” said Lindberg. “An undergraduate architectural thesis is going to be a lonely and often personal road to travel through design. Trusting the process, and insisting on a language of excellence, a thesis like Jenna’s will invite future students to explore brave ways to render something like love, for example, as ‘an architecture.’” 

Jurors for the 2024 Kossman Design Competition, as it has become known in the Stuckeman School, were Franca Trubiano, Kossman Juror, associate professor and co-director of the Humanities + Urban + Design Initiative in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania and a registered architect with l’Ordre des Architects du Québec; Michael Jefferson, co-principal of Jefferson, Lettieri Office and lecturer in Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and Planning; and Alex Donahue, an associate at Michael Graves Architecture and a Penn State alumnus.    

Folk’s classmates Andrew Ferreri and Alex Petersen earned honorable mention recognitions in the thesis competition.  

The annual Kossman Design Thesis Award is presented to the most deserving fifth-year student in the professional bachelor of architecture program for excellence in design based on their senior thesis, as recommended by the faculty and the jury to the head of the Department of Architecture. 

Named for 1949 Penn State architectural engineering alumnus Paul Kossman, the thesis competition began in 1990 and has since become a coveted award among fifth-year architecture students.