Deborah Garcia grew up in Los Angeles, the oldest of four sisters. Part of her daily work is teaching, which she sees as an opportunity to actively engage the future of architecture by transforming the way we talk, read, and imagine it, from an educational and conceptual standpoint. 

The rest of her day, she said, deals with having midnight epiphanies and insomnia breakthroughs. She gives credit to several mentors, “incredible people” who have been in her corner and helped her to navigate architecture by encouraging her never to let go of who she is. She said they ground her and challenge her never to stop challenging the world around her.

Deborah’s Exhibit Columbus project, RESPONDER, is the largest spatial endeavor she has taken on to date, and it has made her hungry to expand her notions of how sound and space can be choreographed to produce an immersive communal experience with architecture. Its scale feels like the start of something even bigger, she said. 

At the core of the project is a 9-foot sound cabinet called RECORDAR. This sonic structure began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology three years ago. Its name originates from its unique built-in recording and broadcasting system. The tower can record and play simultaneously to produce loud and booming loops of layered sound. In RESPONDER, the sound cabinet plays a different role, here recording and broadcasting the sounds of the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library building itself. The cabinet acts like a voice box for the building.

The building is the RESPONDER, and the cabinet acts like a tool to amplify its voice.

As a Latina designer who is underrepresented in architecture, Deborah said a lot of her approach to space-making deals with feelings and conditions of discomfort and strangeness. Throughout much of her education, she has felt like a “stranger in a strange land,” something that she has slowly come to understand as a powerful methodology for considering and choreographing space and how our bodies relate to it. 

She said that architecture has so much power to alienate, control, and separate. Simultaneously, it can challenge, undo and break our conceptions about how the world can be. As so much of our built environment becomes corporatized, weaponized, and separated from our bodies and the bodies of the most vulnerable, it is vital to keep imagining an architecture—and a relationship to architecture—that is not transactional but deeply personal. 

She said what makes her most proud is discussing her work with her parents and sisters and having them become excited about it.

This excerpt is from the 2023 Field Guide. Download it here.