Julia Jamrozik and Coryn Kempster are Toronto-based designers, artists and educators who have collaborated since 2003. Together they create spaces and objects that interrupt everyday situations in critically engaging and playful ways.
As a multi-disciplinary practice, they operate at a variety of scales, from temporary installations to permanent public artworks and architectural projects. Their artistic practice focuses on ‘social infrastructures’ which seek to build community by fostering playful interactions in physical space. Their academic research focuses on the role of play in the built environment and alternative methods of documentation as a form of historic preservation. They are the authors of “Growing up Modern: Childhoods in Iconic Homes” (Birkhäuser, 2021).
In 2018 the Architectural League of New York honored their work with the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers.
Julia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architectural Science at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Formerly, Coryn was an Architect at Herzog & de Meuron and a Project Director at Harry Gugger Studio in Basel, Switzerland. Julia was also an Architect at Herzog & de Meuron, taught design studios at the ETH in Zurich and was an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo SUNY.
Julia holds a BA(Hons) from the University of Toronto and a Master of Architecture from the University of British Columbia. Coryn has a BA(Hons) from the University of Toronto and earned his Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a concentration in Visual Arts where he was a teaching assistant to Joan Jonas, Ute Meta Bauer, Antoni Muntadas and Krzysztof Wodiczko.
Together they have exhibited in galleries, produced temporary outdoor installations and realized permanent public artworks in Canada, USA, Germany, France, Italy and South Korea, including solo exhibitions at Vtape in Toronto and the Weissenhofwerkstatt in Stuttgart, Germany.
