Alum in Action: Violette de la Selle on Architecture as a Collective Act

^{Photo: Benjamin Piascik}

Violette de la Selle, BSArch '08; Yale School of Architecture, M.Arch '14
Founding Member, Citygroup; Critic, Yale School of Architecture

Violette de la Selle is an architect, critic at Yale School of Architecture, and a founding member of Citygroup, a New York City–based architecture collective and project space devoted to questioning the structures that shape architectural practice. Organized as a non-hierarchical group with no principal architects or directors, Citygroup is a platform for critical discourse, research, exhibitions, and public exchange, including Dialogue Not Monologue, an ongoing debate series that challenges disciplinary norms and expands conversations about architectural agency. Citygroup’s work has been recognized with a League Prize from The Architectural League of New York, inclusion in AIA New York’s New Practices New York, and multiple Graham Foundation grants.

After graduating from UVA School of Architecture and completing her graduate studies at Yale School of Architecture, where she co-edited Perspecta 49, la Selle developed a fluid relationship between professional practice, editorial work, and teaching. At Becker + Becker, she served as project manager for the transformation of Marcel Breuer's Pirelli Building into the net-zero Hotel Marcel in New Haven—and prior to that she worked for SHoP Architects and Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. She has contributed to publications including AA Files, San Rocco, and the New York Review of Architecture. Across these roles, and in her ongoing research on building transformation in Lower Manhattan, she has developed a practice grounded in questioning how architecture can operate more critically within the social, political, and economic forces that shape the built environment.

In this interview, la Selle reflects on the origins of Citygroup, the urgency of public dialogue within the discipline, and how her A‑School education continues to inform a practice grounded in collective thinking, preservation, and civic responsibility.

^{Citygroup's space in the Lower East Side, New York City. Courtesy of Citygroup.}

Citygroup was founded to question the structures that shape architectural practice. What felt necessary to challenge, and how has being part of that collective reshaped your perspective as an architect? 

Within a few years of completing our graduate studies, among peers, we felt disheartened with the viable professional paths ahead. A corporate office has access to civic-scale projects, but these firms work at the discretion of their developer or institutional clients, who generally prioritize the business model behind a project over its design. As a result, formal ingenuity is directed at the surface treatment of buildings rather than used to develop novel architectural ideas. Relatively small offices, started by architects who break out on their own, generally take on single-family residential projects. Then, architectural creativity is reserved for a small audience with means. In neither case is the critical thinking we learn in school, where architecture can manifest social ideals, instrumentalized.

We were eager to recapture the momentum and idealism we felt in studio.

We also had a hunch that working as a team—mobilizing our interests, judgement, and design abilities, we could apply our architectural tools to the real world. As architects, we wanted to reckon with the lived implications of architecture.

Through initiatives like Dialogue not Monologue, you’ve created platforms for exchange at Citygroup between architects and the broader public. What kinds of conversations feel most urgent for the discipline right now?

The Debates began by bringing into question the role, the scope, the tools, and the value or architecture as a discipline. The common backbone to this, the matter of the architect’s agency seems particularly pressing, as we navigate the present landscape and wrestle with its trans-scalar and layered challenges (housing need and climate change, chiefly). Personally, I believe that the multi-skilled architects are poised to develop interesting solutions to these complex scenarios that tie together design, policy, stakeholders, financing—but that we need to make the case that we should be doing this work.

We have held more than a dozen debates since 2018. In fact, the debates were the first collective enterprise that paved the way for Citygroup. Through an animated discussion in which disagreement is welcome, and everyone present is expected to speak up, we hope to test theory and ideals against our lived experiences. The conversation tends to unfold among a majority of designers, but we always hear supplemental perspectives from visitors to the space who are not architects or artists.
 

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Your two-part research project Patterns of Change and Keep the Change, focused on Chinatown and the Lower East Side, explores preservation as an ongoing, adaptive process shaped by use, policy, and time. How have those ideas aligned with your practice? 

Experiences in practice, such as the transformation of the Pirelli building in New Haven, and prior to that, the reconstructed Tin Building, in the South Street Seaport in NYC, offered me in-depth exposure with the commonplace applications of preservation today in the US. 

Our narrow policies play an immense role in the outcomes of preservation projects, producing unintended consequences which to me seem contrary to the very impetus for preservation.

There are many characteristics of buildings that may merit safeguarding, only one of which is the façade. Today, protocols are almost exclusively aimed at complete façade restoration, while the structure, function, resident community of a building can be, and usually are, stripped away. I have nevertheless observed that the older buildings that remain occupied but are not listed have frequently undergone dramatic transformations, in order to stay useful. What if many aspects of a building were valued? What if change and reconfiguration were always allowed, in adjustable degrees, to keep the buildings from becoming rigid?

Analysis of urban transformation on a block of Mulberry Street, from Patterns of Change by Violette de la Selle and Wes Hiatt. Courtesy of Citygroup.

Your work spans professional practice, editorial work, curation, and teaching. How do these different roles inform one another, and what, if any, questions or themes carry across them? 

As a graduate student, I co-edited the architecture journal Perspecta with a fellow Wahoo, AJ Artemel (BSArch ’11), and Russel LeStourgeon. This kept us in constant discussion after we graduated, as we wrapped up the issue. This joint adventure and the group intelligence it produced motivated me to keep working with my peers. This experience led me to value overlapping commitments: I could toggle back and forth between editing and my work designing buildings in an architectural office.
 

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In addition to debates, Citygroup organizes exhibitions. With this, we really hope to demonstrate how architectural form is or can be instrumentalized in the face of various constraints. We endeavor to showcase investigations of the city or other such shared and contested environments. We seek to show how projects are formed out of group efforts. As I mentioned above, working on listed or landmarked projects in practice led me to the research and exhibitions Patterns of Change and Keep the Change. I tap into all of these experiences in the studios and courses that I teach.

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For their installation Off the Fence (2022), Citygroup produced a series of political posters addressing gentrification, displacement, development, and real estate speculation within Chinatown and the Lower East Side, including statements from media sources and local residents responding to a luxury development project. Photo: Em Johnson, courtesy of Citygroup

What are one or two lessons or lasting impacts from your A-School education that have shaped your professional life? What do you continue to carry with you?

One of my favorite aspects of my time in the A-school was the rigorous and diversified methods of thinking that characterized our coursework. Studio, history, structures, theory--all required a different sort of reasoning and output (design projects, papers, exams). Before we had studio, we took Peter Waldman’s Lessons of the Lawn in our first semester. The course set the tone for thinking synthetically across text, slides, diagrams and fabulation. Afterwards, I found that each course, including those outside of Campbell Hall, was helpful in thinking about and re-framing the next. 

In my life since being a student, I have cherished opportunities to do more than one kind of activity.

In my time at UVA, the A-school was abuzz with motivated and passionate students and faculty. It was exhilarating to be in that environment where, though architecture was the pursuit, the discussions ranged far and wide. I still feel that it is so fortunate to share the field with people who care deeply about it.