Design With Love: At Home In America

Design with Love: At Home in America (Schiffer Publishing 2020) is a photography essay of the work of Rose Fellows from 2000 to the present by former Enterprise design & sustainability vice president, Rose Fellowship director, and 2001-2004 Rose Fellow Katie Swenson, with photographer Harry Connolly.

Enterprise Community Partners Rose Fellowship is a two-year partnership between Enterprise, design fellows, and community partners that provides community design solutions in affordable housing and community development.

The book captures the lessons of 20 years of community-based development to create beautiful, well-designed affordable housing for some of America’s most vulnerable communities, from the streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles to disinvested blocks of West Baltimore. These heartbreaking yet hopeful stories and photographs show how designers, social activists, and community members have worked together to improve justice and equity — even in the most dire circumstances of inequality, racism, and neglect.

Swenson’s leadership grew the architecture and community development program to graduate more than 50 fellows over the past decade. The Enterprise Rose Fellowship has been showcased at the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the New York Center for Architecture, and the National Building Museum, and recognized by the American Institute of Architects for its groundbreaking work. This coffee-table style book displays the images and work done across the country to help citizens find their home. Interview and expert topics to be outlined.

"Design with Love is a powerful testament to the value of compassion and empathy in community building. This book is an indispensable account of how to make progress with the hearts, minds and hands of dedicated designers who have forged deep and meaningful bonds with the communities that they serve. Each story paints a dynamic picture of a Rose Fellow and their commitment to bringing justice home, in the poetic words of Katie Swenson. Through evocative imagery and deeply personal testimonies, Swenson has authored what should be viewed as a seminal piece on how architecture can become a force for healing in our nation and the world."

Kimberly Dowdell, 2019-2020 NOMA National President, SEED Co-Founder and HOK Principal 

“Equal parts shepherd, colleague, and champion, Katie Swenson takes us on a rich and gratifying journey across the American landscape highlighting the immutable power of design. Opening space for architects, developers, communities, and individuals to tell their unique yet interconnected stories in clear, unambiguous terms, Swenson presents a powerful counter to the common claim that architects can’t be agents of social change.

Elegantly written and easily relatable, the ten projects in this retrospective are impassioned yet peaceful testimonials to the impact architecture can make on individuals, communities, and architects themselves. It is no surprise to learn many Rose Fellows have never left the communities they came to serve. Such is the power of love.

While Swenson and her cohort would never make this claim, if architecture is to have any hope of living up to its civic responsibility as a profession, this is a model of practice that must be embraced, supported, and as Swenson does with deft and grace, celebrated.”

Craig L. Wilkins, PhD, Author of Aesthetics of Equity and Diversity Among Architects

“The Rose Fellows are lighting the path so we can see how to design in partnership with communities. Design with Love demonstrates how these young design visionaries are helping to amplify the beating hearts of communities, spaces that bring safety, health, beauty, joy and comfort to families.”

Diane Ives, Fund Advisor, Kendeda Fund

“In this remarkable book, Katie Swenson traces the experiences of ten former Rose Fellows as they navigate the daunting, complex, and often unfamiliar world of affordable housing. Their stories - highlighted with exquisite photography by Harry Connolly - underscore the immense social, racial and economic inequities in our society, but they also speak to the tenacity and resilience of communities that are determined to overcome them. Not surprisingly, many of the Fellows have gone on to initiate their own community-based organizations that are rooted in the public interest, certain to spawn a new generation of civic-minded leaders. How refreshing, in a period marked by such spectacle and strife, to focus on something as timeless, fundamental and essential as love.”

David Gamble, AIA AICP, co-author Rebuilding the American City

“The works that the fellows, their community development hosts, and their communities’ residents have created are models of emergent solutions to the issues of social justice, income inequality, and environmental destruction. These are particularly powerful forces in lower-income communities. To overcome them requires the equally powerful force of collective vision, manifested through design, finance, development, and construction skills. But, as so beautifully written about by Katie Swenson and photographed by Harry Connolly in this book, it also requires deep listening, collaboration, and love....Love is most powerful in its collective form. The solutions to the issues of our age lie in cultures of pervasive altruism.”

Jonathan F. P. Rose, Author, The Well-Tempered City