Ryan Ball

Ryan is an architect and educator. His research focuses on issues of materiality, detailing, and performance embedded in methods of industrial production in architecture and the built environment. His pedagogy seeks to demystify the often unapproachable topic of building systems. Through the juxtaposition of familiar icons of postwar American suburbia, such as processed foods, losing sports teams, and pristine lawns, his teaching seeks to leverage participatory art practice techniques and examine the US cultural relationship with technology, labor, and class. Recent research interests include: working with textiles and sewing techniques as an embodied aesthetics of labor; creating image based representational materials to develop an architecture of tiles, sheets, and rolls; exploring the inversion of structural expression through the tectonic interior; and confronting housing affordability by developing missing middle typologies through a radical re-programming.

Ryan is the founder of ball practice. He holds both a Bs.Arch and a M.Arch from the University of Cincinnati, and previously he has taught design studios at the University of Cincinnati, Syracuse University, and CalPoly San Luis Obispo. He is a licensed architect in both New York and Ohio. Most recently, he worked as a Project Architect at Adjaye Associates in New York City where he worked on the newly completed DREAM Charter School in the South Bronx, The Architects Newspaper winner of “Best Interior Workplace” and Finalist for “Project of the Year” the 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East workspace and lobby, and the ongoing addition and reconstruction of the Princeton Art Museum, scheduled to open in 2024.