Cory Henry creates architecture that engages cultural narratives, spatial history, and the specificity of place. Through his practice, Atelier Cory Henry, he pursues work that deepens public discourse and roots itself in the intersections of art, urbanism, and architecture.
Recognition for his work includes The American Academy in Rome’s Rome Prize, the MacDowell Fellowship, and the Bogliasco Fellowship, as well as selection as winner of the National Emerging Architect On-Olive Residence competition by Emily Pulitzer and Steve Trampe. The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) has recognized him as an emerging force in the field. His work and writing have been published and exhibited in Empathic Design: Perspectives on Creating Inclusive Spaces (Island Press, 2024), Architectural Record, Architecture Magazine, the Lisbon Triennale, the Monterey Design Conference, and the AIA. He has participated in panel discussions and delivered lectures at the Venice Biennale, the National Building Museum, Real Matter, the Monterey Design Conference, and leading institutions in the U.S. and internationally.
Beyond practice, Cory contributes to advancing design pedagogy. He holds a recurring position with Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and was twice honored with the University of Maryland's Kea Distinguished Professorship in Architecture and Design. His teaching experience extends to Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Texas at Austin, Syracuse University, and the University of Southern California.
How has your time in Rome shaped or shifted the direction of your project so far?
My time in Rome has expanded the framework of my project. When I first arrived, I expected to be documenting and exhibiting how diasporic communities shape identity in public spaces through art-architectural interventions.
However, since being in Rome I've visited sites like Ararat, a Kurdish cultural and community center established inside an abandoned slaughterhouse in Testaccio, and MAAM, an abandoned factory transformed into an inhabited museum where art, social housing, and multicultural activism coexist in a single hybrid space. Following these visits—and conversations with community members, curators, artists, architects, and city officials who have been agents of these and other projects—I’ve started examining the institutional policies that support or hinder these self-organizing, informal, bottom-up creative initiatives. I'm also interested in how art and architecture can intervene in the symbolic identity of a place, not only in its physical form.
What part of your daily routine or environment at the Academy has most influenced you and your work?
Conversations with other Fellows, Residents, and Visiting Artists. My work and interests cross disciplines, and this environment makes cross-disciplinary dialogue constant. Everyone is generous in sharing their work and genuinely willing to interrogate each other’s ideas in ways that open productive angles and strengthen each other’s work. The Academy’s programming has a similar impact—the tours, lectures, and site engagements continually expand my reading of Rome.
The library has become one of my favorite places to work. It is an extraordinary resource, and on any given day I might be reading about public art in public space, studying the social history of a ruin, reading a Carrie Mae Weems book signed by Weems herself, reviewing archival photography, or turning to rare volumes in a room designed by Michael Graves. Beyond the collection, the library makes more than a century of accumulated knowledge and Fellow contributions visible. I’ll find a Visiting Scholar’s dissertation from 15 years ago that speaks directly to a question I’m addressing now, or come across archival material that reframes a site I visited the day before. That layering of past and present inquiry is what makes the library so inspiring and integral to my daily work.
What are you hoping to explore or deepen in the remaining months of your residency?
I want to deepen my study of informal and reclaimed spaces and understand how those conditions might inform contemporary interventions of public art and architecture, both spatially and institutionally. I plan to continue visiting sites in Rome and elsewhere and develop this research toward an exhibition that brings together the narratives embedded in these places—revealing how communities create identity and claim space through creative action. The exhibition will function both as documentation and as an architectural–artistic proposition, asking how these practices can expand our understanding of how public space is designed and continually redefined.