Ep. 226: Neuroaesthetics Pioneer Suchi Reddy on How Form Follows Feeling
Architect, artist, and designer, Suchi Reddy, grew up in India where her home played a critical role in her appreciation of how environments shape our experiences. Now, at the helm of her architecture firm + design studio, Reddymade, she’s built a body of work spanning residential, large-scale commercial environments, and immersive interactive public art installations. As a leader in the practice of neuroaesthetics, a neuroscientific study of the impact of art and aesthetics on brain and body, all her work follows her guiding philosophy: “form follows feeling.” Integrating neuroaesthetics into her architecture and design work is an ongoing endeavor in the art of making the invisible visible, as in the physiological responses to spaces or the sounds plants emit in response to stress, and pushing the boundaries of of how we can use design to create spaces that truly nurture our wellbeing.
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Suchi Reddy: Our culture, architecture, all of these things really need to round out our experience as humans, right? To help us have more self-awareness, more empathy, more connection.
Amy Devers: Hi everyone. I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to Suchi Reddy, architect, designer, artist and leader in the field of Neuroesthetics - which explores the profound impact our environments have on the brain and body. The founder of Reddymade, a New York-based practice established in 2002, Suchi has built a body of work spanning public art installations, large-scale commercial spaces, and residential projects ranging from single-family homes to interiors and prefab architecture. Guided by her mantra “form follows feeling,” her architectural and artistic practice integrates neuroaesthetics to create environments that positively shape human experience. Celebrated projects include: the first flagship Google retail space in New York, rated LEED Platinum, “me+you,” an interactive AI and light sculpture currently on display at Michigan Central Station in Detroit, and first unveiled in 2021 at the Smithsonian in DC for the Futures exhibit; a minimalist home in Salt Point, New York, with artist Ai Weiwei, And “A Space For Being,” a collaboration with Google, Johns Hopkins, and Muuto measuring the impacts of neuroaesthetics. A site-specific art installation titled Turbulence 2025, on display through October 26th of this year at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, is Inspired by research on how plants express stress sounds in a frequency inaudible to human ears - the work takes what we don’t see and hear and makes it perceptible - in order to inspire empathy and action.In addition to teaching at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, she’s also a prolific speaker and advocate for designing for wellbeing. I was able to catch a recent lecture at the Newport Art Museum and it was fascinating! In addition to teaching at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, she’s also a prolific speaker and advocate for designing for action. As you’ll hear, Suchi is a wildly creative, deeply empathetic soul who is channeling all of her intellect, energy, agency, and resources into building a world where we all feel included and cared for in the spaces we inhabit. Talk about using your superpowers for good…Here’s Suchi…
Suchi: I’m Suchi Reddy, I live and work in wonderful New York City and I am an architect, designer and artist.
Amy: Yes, you are, on many, many levels. You are known as a pioneer for integrating neuroaesthetics into your work. You’re a pioneer of the field and I think it would be helpful for us to start with a working definition of neuroaesthetics. Your studios mantra is ‘Form Follows Feeling.’ Talk to me about what that means and what neuroaesthetics is why we should care about it?
Suchi: It’s a great place to start! Everyone knows that the spaces that they’re in affect how they feel. Everyone knows this, but it isn’t a stated goal of design. And the field of neuroaesthetics aims to uncover through the work of lots of different people in different disciplines, like cognitive scientists and neuroscientists and architects and artists and psychologists, what the built environment does to us, to our brains and our bodies. So if we can understand how we as instruments, if you want to call us that, respond to the stimuli that we’re receiving, which is what we do generally in medicine, right? How is our environment a stimulus that we’re accepting and what is that doing to our state of being? And does that affect our wellbeing, does that affect our mental state? Does that affect our physical wellbeing and our mental state? What combination of those things can our environment affect? This is what neuroaesthetics looks at. So it’s looking at how our physical experiences affect our brains and bodies.
Amy: Which to me sounds like essential considering that so many of us are walking around with anxiety disorders and autoimmune conditions and a general disaffection or sense of loneliness. And yet it’s a fairly new field. I know you’ve been doing it for, 10 years-ish?
Suchi: Yeah, sort of a decade now that we’ve been really focused on this work, through this title. But even before that, you had asked me about the ethos of my studio Form Follows Feeling, and that’s an idea that goes back to my childhood. So it comes from there and my love for architecture. But neuroaesthetics itself is about a 22 year old field, which is fairly new in science. But it’s so interesting. It’s like every time I explain what it is, everyone is like, ‘oh, that makes so much sense, of course that’s how things are, of course that’s how they’re affecting us.’ And this is why I don’t say this is a ‘new’ thing, people say, ‘oh, then are we creating some kind of new architecture?’ We’re not. We’re actually distilling the principles that humans have responded to and flourished within and succeeded with for centuries. And it doesn’t happen all the time. There are times when certain buildings, like everyone knows, our spaces… the spiritual spaces affect them in a certain way. And they really have a very strong effect, both on the mind and the body. And the body, if in those instances you could actually measures cortisone level or heartrate variation, you would see that there’s a difference in those metrics, right?
Amy: Yeah.
Suchi: But we haven’t had that ability to do that until now. So the goal of the field as it currently stands is to be able to, using data gathering technologies, really try to sort of validate things we know, in some ways. But for it to be so new is design language and as a design tool, I think I’m really honored and delighted and excited to be on the pioneering edge of this.
Amy: Yes, okay. So considering that for everything, like until the most recent 22 years, or even 10 years in terms of architecture in neuroaesthetics the goal of architecture has not really been focused in on community wellbeing, it’s been a lot more about urban design and productivity and in a lot of cases, hustling you. (Laughter) Finding ways… I’m just thinking of shopping malls and the way they make you walk around to get to the next up escalator so that you can maybe get distracted and buy something in between floors. This concept of designing spaces that are actually meant to care for communities seems so obvious and yet so groundbreaking at the same time. Give me an example of how architecture can serve as a vehicle of community care?
Suchi: Well, that is such a good question. And again, I think there are examples of this that are age-old, that we all know of spaces, public spaces perhaps… I mean I’m lucky enough to live in New York City so there are many public spaces here where I feel like the community has a voice and a place and we feel everyone else’s presence pretty much everywhere in the city. So we get to either filter that or take it in and architecture is a tool to do either of those things, right? But what I would say is architecture is, for me, one of the major tools, not just from the perspective of a personal home, but also from the perspective of how we build our worlds, our cities, our worlds. Of how we affect how our communities come together and how they feel. For instance, I always say we design prisons with the express idea of making whoever is living in there, housed in there, feel a certain way.
Amy: Yeah.
Suchi: We don’t design the rest of the world with the opposite. That’s not the goal of the rest of the world, although it should be. What the goal of the rest of the world is, let’s satisfy code requirements, let’s get it to be as functional as possible, let’s do it for the least amount of money we can spend, all of which are amazing goals. And all of which need to be met. But for me the compass of design actually has to be pointed in a different place. It has to be pointed to how do we flourish in this space together? How is this major tool that encompasses us and allows us to do everything, are we actually maximizing its potential? For some reason we look at a spider and we can never think about it without its web, its always part of its web. And humans somehow, we’re separate from our environment and it’s not true at all. For me that’s a 360 loop. We affect our environment; our environment affects us and we need to be really sensitive to that. And obviously if we’re building our worlds outwards from our bodies, so our bodies, our clothes, our homes, our cities, our communities, our world, the through line through that is feeling.
Amy: Yeah.
Suchi: And this is why we think about feeling, first and foremost in my studio, in my work, in any and all of the typologies of work we do, because we do lots of different kinds of things from residential to retail to commercial to hospitality to healthcare. (Laughs) We’re a very strange practice in some ways where we’re in a lot of different kinds of fields and typologies of buildings. But we want to bring and prioritize this idea of how do you feel here? And what can we do to make that better for you?
Amy: Yeah, I’d love to hear some examples of how you have done that, implemented it practically through materiality, acoustics, spatial arrangement, all of that. Talk to me how it manifests?
Suchi: Okay, so you pointed some very good basic principles out. And essentially it’s all the principles of architecture that we use and bring to the table as our tools. But what we’re doing is looking at how do we use these tools to design for a certain outcome. And we’re making sure that that outcome actually prioritizes the kind of feeling that that space is supposed to generate. So for instance if we’re just designing a living room in someone’s house, or we’re designing a residential project, and I have a lot of creative clients, so this is for a creative client. And I know that given their very demanding schedules and the fact that they have to be very public, in lots of different kinds of ways, their spaces within their homes that they need to be quiet, that they need to be able to have privacy, security, this kind of feeling of being cocooned. But they also need to be able to feel inspired. So when we’re designing a house we’re looking very carefully at where we’re placing the windows, what is the exact view through that window? That window is not just there on the façade because it’s what it is. And we look at the size of the window. There’s a house we did Upstate where the windows actually cut off right above the eyebrow. So it really makes you focus into the landscape just like, oh, here’s the green 10 acres that are outside my window, but it makes you focus on it. Because you could be in a very verdant rural landscape and at the same time come out of it being like not having… or really feeling the power of it. So we use the tools of architecture to really focus in on that. To hone, to amplify what your response to these kinds of stimuli can be. That’s one instance, right? Or if I’ve got someone sitting at a desk in an office and they need to be able to look out for a distance, but they also need to have small things, maybe sometimes I create objects that are like little whirls of wonder that I put on their desk. That makes your brain wander, that makes your brain go into a different space. And then you can come back to that space and you can be like, oh, I was out there for a minute writing a story in my head and here I am looking at the sunlight coming in and making this kind of shadow in my room. And even if you’re not processing all that consciously, you’re processing it subconsciously. So when you come out of your creative session within that space, all of those elements have fed it, right? So the work product that you have is something that’s a little bit different than it would have been had you been sitting in four white walls and a wood desk and, you know, nothing else, right? (Laughs) so in residential work we kind of… it gets very specific sometimes, as always our work does, as far as it can, to the user. In retail, for instance, we had the opportunity to do Google’s first ever retail store in New York City and that was an incredible example of a lot of the principles of neuroaesthetics because you would think here’s a giant technology company that’s making its first physical presence. It’s going to be full of screens, it’s going to be like the Apple Store, it’s going to be big, shiny images of things. And we decided to take the exact opposite view. We wanted to create a space where you come in, you exhale, you feel a sense of wonder, you feel a sense of play, which for me is the real essence of technology. That’s what technology gives you, is this ability to play, this ability to discover things. How does the space actually amplify that? And so we were the first to create all wooden walls, and this project also was LEED certified by the way, which is very difficult to do in retail, LEED Platinum…
Amy: Wow, yeah, that’s impressive!
Suchi: Exactly. And so the walls are wood, the floor is a soft carpet, it’s actually soft so you can step on it, and all of the colours are kind of calibrated so that you feel like you’re being held within this warm volume that’s not overwhelming, not directional in any way. And then we even dematerialized all the screens. The big TV screen is kind of tucked away for when they have talks and stuff, it’s not the first thing you see. The objects are actually… you learn them through this special technology which is actually very old technology that was reinvented very innovatively for the store, as transparent screens, through which you can see the object, but you can also see information about it. So it becomes this other technological play that’s showing you about AR, in a way it’s AR. And because the footprint of the store was really long, which isn’t great for retail, and it had two entrances at strange spots, you came into one place where we created this kind of glass envelope within which you could really learn about the software. But the way it was shown through the glass was through these glimmering lights that come through the screens. And so when you see that from the door, this is a signal to come in, right? These moving, dancing lights. It’s not a screen, they’re moving, dancing lights. They draw you into the space and then you see this very playful kind of sculptural work that basically has different ‘rooms,’ that are made out of cork furniture. So it feels like a play space and it’s like a play room, and you sit and you get to discover all of the products and the objects and stuff. But the material was also chosen carefully. It was made out of cork because the temperature of cork is very close to the temperature of the body, so it doesn’t matter if it’s winter, summer, what people are wearing, when they sit on it, there’s no friction. They get to feel always comfortable in the space. They get to always play. So these are some of the kind of neuroaesthetics cues that we bring together. And like I’m always saying to people, you know, everyone asks me, what are the top 10 things I can do to make this space a neuroaesthetic space? What it is, is really bringing the skill of the designer into play, to understand which elements to bring forward, which elements to recede, which we do in design, normally, in good design. So we’re thinking about proportions, we’re thinking about scale, we’re thinking about how people might feel more comfortable in cubic spaces, slight curves to spaces make people feel more comfortable, softer. How do we get that to work?
In healthcare we’ve actually done that, we looked at a prototypical hospital room design actually where we were creating a separate space for the caregiver and for the child in the room, who was the patient, so that the stress of one doesn’t affect the other and then this was also based on research that we found about this. We created video imagery that showed the passage of time in nature, because you have time clocks and cells in your body, we all react differently. Not just at looking… like if you didn’t have a window and you looked at green things through your hospital room, it’s been proven that recovery rates are 30% faster. But what happens if you can also see the passage of time? And if you didn’t have that window, how could you do that? Do you really feel like that? So in every typology there’s different pieces of this information that we pull together and we’re obviously a growing field. So there’s constantly new information being generated by all of the academics and researchers who are working in this field, who are studying things. Whether it’s transition spaces, whether it’s the colour of light, whether it’s texture and material and how is that affecting people, you know? So we gather whatever we know to be the latest information. We bring it constantly into the design flow of the studio.
Amy: That is fascinating. And as you’re painting this picture I’m also just more attuned to the contrast, and I’m thinking about the passage of time and how that’s deliberately kept from you in like Vegas casinos, so that you’ll stay there longer and…
Suchi: Exactly! Exactly. (Laughter)
Amy: Oh my god, there’s so many ways that our spaces are actually manipulating us in hostile or hustle kind of ways…
Suchi: Yes.
Amy: And then to think about the exponential impact if all of our spaces were designed to make us feel better than when we came in, the possibility of that is enormous. And makes me feel really, really excited for the expansion of this field.
Suchi: Well, this is the thing. I just feel like every day I’m humbled and I’m honored that I do what I do, that I love doing what I do, because for me this is a giant tool to really help people. Whether we’re doing high end residential or we’re doing affordable housing, it doesn’t matter. We’re working in the same way, for all different parts of our clientele in the spectrum of projects that we involve ourselves with and this is also why the range of projects in the office is very wide. Because it’s really important to me that these ideas travel in every direction, as much as they can.
Amy: Yes, okay, so speaking of that, you have a very robust practice in terms of immersive art installations in which you get to further your research, but also make that research more digestible, understandable, experienceable for the average member of society who might not be aware of that. So I’m really curious about the things that you’re looking into and the things that you’re invested in making visible, that are invisible.
Suchi: Part of the reason why the art and public art side of our practice, of my practice has developed, was really because the first one was sort of an accident. I was invited by some friends to do something and I did it and I could see the impact on hundreds and hundreds of people. And it was democratic, everybody came to it.
Amy: Which project was this, is this A Space for Being?
Suchi: No, that one was much more… well, that too actually, and we can start there. In fact that’s a really good one. So that, A Space for Being, which you mentioned, was an exhibit we did in Milan during Milan Design Week. And obviously this is like the crowd that comes are people who know design. But it’s not just designers or architects, it’s regular people up the street. It is all ages of people and the brief there was to actually design three different rooms that had the same function and then Google who commissioned the work and along with, in collaboration with us and a lab at Johns Hopkins and the French company Muuto, they designed a band. And this band measured bodily metrics while people were in different spaces. So the charge to me was to create three different atmospheres and work with neuroaesthetic cues to see how I could amplify those atmospheres and then we would get the data from people. Now first of all, you had to get people to sit for 10 minutes, quietly, without their phones, in each room, without talking to each other. This is a feat, as we all know.
Amy: Yes, especially in an environment like Milan where people are trying to see as much as possible in a short period of time.
Suchi: Right! Yeah, and I have to say it was such an incredible project, such a giant success in that we had lines around the block of people waiting forever to come in and be able to experience it. And it was the first of its kind ever to do something like this. So I designed actually the very first kind of open space where you got told about the experience that you were going in, because again, this idea of transition is something that’s very, very important in neuroaesthetics and it’s completely probably overlooked in most types of architecture. How you enter and leave and experience are both very, very important aspects of how you feel.
Amy: These are thresholds, yeah.
Suchi: And how you process the information that you’re either getting or have gotten or about to get. And these are really important things and we don’t make space for them generally speaking. And then I designed these kinds of, what I called ‘cleansing chambers,’ so they were anechoic rooms that absorbed all of the sound, they were dark, they were small, the lighting was very dim. So you went through one of those so that you could kind of shed for a hot second what the world stimulus you just came from, the street and all of these spaces was…And then the first room, I drew my inspiration from early… the caves that we grew up in, you know? So our, I should say, humanity grew up in, where the walls were actually coated with real mud and it had real wood. And you know how difficult this is to do, particularly in a kind of installation format. But everything was real. The tapestry was real wool, it was dyed with the pigments from flowers. I even had an 80 year old cactus in the room…
Amy: Oh my gosh.
Suchi: For me it was important that the energies of these things populate the space. You know the difference between real wood and vinyl, you don’t have to touch it. You kind of know it’s there.
Amy: Even if not conscious, intuitively they could…
Suchi: Yeah, intuitively you know, you know the quality of the environment you’re in. And that first room we had books that were cooking and poetry and making and those kinds of things, so that your brain could get into this kind of different space. And I purposefully made that the first space because I knew people were over-stimulated coming in. So they came in through this white, lit space, the lettering on the wall that told you about the exhibit wasn’t even in your face, it was recessed into the wall, it was a texture, so you could touch it, you could read it. There was plaster, it was very soft, the way that it let the light come through. You found out what you needed to do, you wore your band, you went through the first palate cleansing room. Then you went into this earth room, then you went into a brighter colour palate cleansing room. Then you went into, what we called the ‘Bossa nova Space,’ bright colors, lights in all directions, brilliant flowers from tropical places, pop-up books to play with. A totally… Bossa nova music, like it was a very different atmosphere.
Amy: Yeah.
Suchi: And then you went into another cleansing room and then you went into the last one which had like coming from above, the walls were made of paper, but it felt like concrete and made these artworks out of burned wood, so you could touch them, but you could also smell the burned wood in the space. The books were all artbooks and they large forms that people could look at. Even children if they came into the space would be able to understand very well what they were looking at. And then you went into a space where you took off your band, your information was read, your data was deleted and you were given a set of… the characteristics of whichever space technically your body said it was most at ease in. Or you were most excited in. And all of this information was presented to people in the form of this water color ring that had these flares of color, where they were excited and where they were calm. And it was a wonderful thing to see people really realize that one’s reaction to space is not subjective. It’s actually a very physical, visceral thing that’s acting on us all the time, just like sunlight does or the air does. And we feel those things. Our space is doing the same thing. It’s the same.
Amy: What did you glean from that?
Suchi: So I did my anecdotal research as people were leaving and I would make my notes to say, well, did you think you would be most comfortable here, did it meet your expectations, was it actually surprising? And I would say about 50% of the time, or actually slightly more than that, it wasn’t what people thought they were going to feel. Which was also so interesting and then there were very important ideas that came up, like someone who came from South America… like I’m from India, so you know, we come from similar cultures in certain ways. And she was like, well, things look so fancy. I didn’t even think it was made for me, I had to overcome this idea of inclusion, like to really think about how long does that take for someone to get over that. Which space actually created that for them versus the other space. So these kinds of answers emerged from that, that have gone on to be indelible markers on my practice. That I really calibrate a lot of what I do to things that I learned from talking to people.
Amy: You bring up a really interesting point about some people not feeling that spaces are for them and I know that a huge part of your practice is designing so that people feel included. How do you actually balance that with a specificity that you might need, so your space doesn’t feel generic, but everyone feels included, how do you hold everyone in the same space?
Suchi: It’s a really great way of putting that question and this is actually where the artwork is super helpful because personally for my practice, for me, the relationship between the individual and the collective and how those two things feel and influence each other is very, very important. We’ve studied this in the lens of when you say the artworks make certain things visible to everyone who wouldn’t know that… like recently we just did a sculpture that is based on the idea, it’s set in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, it’s up for view now actually, through October…
Amy: Turbulence.
Suchi: Yes! And it basically was inspired by some research I saw about how plants make these hypersonic sounds when they’re communicating distress. And so we as a species don’t hear that because it doesn’t hit our range of hearing, but other species are hearing it. So one thing I wondered is like, what happens if you created a glitch in the landscape, like if you saw a glitch? Would it make you do something? Would you be like, psst, what’s happening there? So I made this installation out of these kinds of mirrored panels that reflect and distort the atmosphere and I got a friend of mine to do a composition based on the clicking sounds that plants make, which you can record if you have a microphone that picks up those frequencies. And when people respond to it, right,these ideas are being made visible. And sometimes then you leave with a larger sense of who you are in your world, what your world is like, what’s actually happening in your world. And this is the goal of, I think, our culture, architecture, all of these things really need to round out our experience as humans, right? To help us have more self-awareness, more empathy, more connection. That’s an amazing goal, whether it’s through an idea or a person or a thing or a type of art, whatever, to really be able to feel this larger connection that’s outside of ourselves. So the work is very focused on that. The lessons we learn from the public art go back into projects that we work on like community centers or hospitals or retail spaces, where we want to create an atmosphere, where immediately and typically for me, there’s a sense of wonder. So for me, wonder is a giant equalizer. You get in…
Amy: Yes! I love this, that you’re saying this! Yes!
Suchi: And everyone, whether it’s a kid, an old person, it can be anybody, we can be from lots of different backgrounds, but if you can kind of go, huh… then you’re on the same level as everybody else. And then you’re responding to your environment from this really open place. You’re not coming to it with like, well, I knew that or I didn’t know that I used to like this or I didn’t… whatever…
Amy: Or I expected it to be this way, so I’m not even paying attention to it, I’m just paying attention to my phone.
Suchi: Exactly. So to really bring you out into your body, into the space, this is something that we try to do in every space. Like in the Google, so for example, it’s very playful. So when you walk in there you’re like, whoa, what’s all this stuff? And again, you have to be very careful to make it feel like a calming experience again, and not a circus, because you can feel that… (Laughter) That’s a different modality, you know? But to really sort of bring this back to how do we use these ideas of wonder. And there’s a lot of research around the feeling of awe and what awe does to us physically, in the body. And how it creates all of these great chemical variations in the body that can actually make you feel great. And that should happen. We should ask for that from our world.
Amy: I agree. I 100% agree and I think nature does a great job, I mean just look at the Grand Canyon or the Fjords, but it just seems very amazing to design intentionally for that.
Suchi: Yes.
Amy: And also it seems kind of difficult because (laughter) the tangential relationship between awe and wonder is also discovery…And curiosity and personal agency, not being force-fed something that automatically sort of negates any sort of awe and wonder. So how do you guide the experience, or not guide the experience?
Suchi: Well, that’s the fun of design, you know what I mean?
Amy: Yeah.
Suchi: Like that’s the fun. You get into it and you’re like, you’re given a brief, whether it’s for a house or it’s for a commercial project. You look at it and you’re like what are the moments, right?
Amy: Yeah.
Suchi: What does actually the site and the context and the building or the interior space offer that you can actually already amplify? How can you create surprise? How can you create discovery? But not in an unsettling way. And not in a way where it’s a one-and-done thing, where maybe you do it, but you come back. Like in our office, for example, in our studio we have a very long kind of white tunnel that has nothing on the walls, which in New York City space is at a high premium, not hanging something on a wall, leaving large expanses of wall blank is not really a thing, right?
Amy: Yeah. (Laughs)
Suchi: Especially in a workspace where you have to pin up stuff and look at things. But it’s very important because that’s a beautiful transition space, it sets you up to come in and out from the world. It brings you into the studio, at the end of the studio, because our view is a brick wall of the building on the other side, of the lightwell, I created this graphic, I’m very interested in these things called anamorphic graphics, like a three-dimensional thing from a distance, but not really…they’re like pieces of lines and things. But if you see them from a certain place they form a shape, so we do that. So that focuses your eye. It gives you a bit of wonder. But it’s not in your face so much when you’re under it, you’re working there, it’s not like oh, I’m hanging under this big cube, you’re not, you know? (Laughs) So it’s ideas like that. So this is the fun, this is why we have fun doing what we do. We think about it in every instance intentionally to create a certain kind of experience.
Amy: And it’s such a revelation, I mean the flip from the needs of the space to the needs of the human, in the space, again, seems so obvious. Like what if we actually focused on the needs of the human and the space comes to serve the human and it’s not necessarily just a box where we have to figure out how all our stuff fits in there.
Suchi: Yeah.
Amy: We don’t pay attention to how it makes us feel. I’ve heard you describe yourself as a serenest.
Suchi: Oh… (Laughter) This is another question that bothers me so much. Like people say, “Are you an architect, are you an artist, are you a designer?” I’m like, “I’m all of those things.”
Amy: Of course!
Suchi: Do you do residential? Do you do commercial? I’m like, if I just said I did hospitality it would mean all of it, would that be okay? You know, it’s like this tendency to put people in boxes, right, that’s very tiring.
Amy: Yes.
Suchi: Then people say, “Are you a modernist, are you a…” personally, I love modern design. But there are people who are over the top, who are traditional, whose work I adore. It’s not something I would do, but I adore it. So when people were asking me, “What do you do?” I said, “What I do is try to make someone feel serene wherever they are.” Whatever that means to them. If they’re a minimalist, that’s what they get. If they’re a maximalist, that’s what they get. If they’re in the middle of that, and they just need some warm textures and whatever it is, they want to be in green spaces, that’s what we’re going to create. And that’s why I called myself a serenest. I wanted to take it out of the idea of style because to be perfectly honest, the reason why this idea of form follows feeling happened was when I was a kid, growing up in a house that was designed actually by an architect and not just by a builder, which was very common in India in those days, I had an epiphany that my house was actually shaping me. And this made me be an architect. This made me follow this feeling and I’m still following that feeling. Wherever I go I want people to have this kind of idea and this relationship to their surroundings of the importance of it, of the way in which it clothes them. That it’s close to them. And taking that idea and then when you go to architecture school and you come out and you’re like, well what style… and who does it look like, and typically it’s like whose work does it remind you of?
Amy: It’s so reductive and it doesn’t embody the substance at the heart of what you’re doing.
Suchi: And the power.
Amy: Yeah.
Suchi: And the power at the heart of it. So I was very tired of this idea of styles. I thought style is one thing to say, but styles are fleeting, as we all know. And they all belong to certain time periods, but we’re humans going through these time periods. It just remains on this level of superficiality when we talk about style. And this is why I actually wanted to really look at what are the factors that actually influence design? And it was our body and our response to it.
Amy: So when I heard you describe yourself as that, the first thing that came to me is the fact that you are working with the materials of the three dimensional world, or the senses that evoke the senses, including aroma and auditory signals, vibration, in order to create a dance with the nervous system that istaking the nervous system into account and deliberately not trying to send it into a provoked state of being.
Suchi: Yes. Yes, absolutely.
Amy: And I was so refreshed to hear that. I also don’t like to talk about style or trends, I feel like it just over-simplifies something that’s much more powerful than that. I’m glad you brought up the power thing. But I’m also super curious about… I mean you talked a bit about it with the Space for Being exhibit, but what kind of data have you assembled for your studio in terms of how to do this dance with the nervous system? How to not spike cortisol, how to, I guess, help somebody stay in the… what is it, the parasympathetic part of…
Suchi: Right, nervous system.
Amy: Yeah.
Suchi: Well, first of all you do need a certain amount of stress, you know? We can’t always be in that state, right? So it’s always a dance between how do we relax people, but we also get them into a state of readiness to handle whatever stimuli are coming their way. And like I said, we do maintain and develop our own library of all the research that we’re exposed to currently through colleagues that I know of and whose work I follow. And that I teach about as well, to inform the kinds of things that we do. But certainly I would say if I were to pick kind of like the five things we start with typically, it’s a sequence of experience that we think about. It would be texture and color and light and sound. And then within that we layer in proportion and scale and temperature, we think about temperature and spaces. If we really need to change things slightly to get you… whether it’s even going from inside to outside to inside again, right? How is that being modulated so that you’re not just over-air conditioned in like this thing… (laughs) But you’re being reintroduced to your body in a certain way and so these are all the things that we think about. The place where it becomes really seminal to think about these kinds of things is how do you design for neurodiversity. Because we did do a research project for two years for a client where we created a giant report about how to design for neurodiversity in the workplace. And we looked at all different kinds of neurodiversities and about 20% of any population identifies as some kind of neurodiverse. If it’s ADHD or autistic or just anxious, you know? And to see how to address these conditions through cues in the environment. Could we? And what became very clear is when you’re trying to address one particular condition you’re really trying to design for the whole, and that’s a very tricky thing to do. Like you were asking me before, how do you make it specialized, right? We all want concierge this and that. It’s possible to deliver that, but you also have to see how that can be inclusive and available to everyone should they need it. And that then becomes a real dance of space planning, logistics, layout, you know, really understanding how to provide spaces for refuge, but allow spaces for discovery, have one not overwhelm the other really setting these kinds of balances within a spatial experience, I’ll call it, not even space. Where those things come together to make you feel like you went through something beautiful. Not that you had to overcome friction at every level.
Amy: Yeah.
Suchi: And that’s something we strive for in everything. So we really look at, you know, what are the pain points here. And in that study actually what we did is, we looked at what a ‘normal person’ would do throughout the day. What their pain points would be, encountering different tasks. What it would look like. How that curve gets deformed. If it’s somebody who has a particular condition. And then overlaid those things. Tried to understand how or where they matched or didn’t match. So to do this kind of research work on our end, which isn’t necessarily academic, but at the same time very practical in terms of figuring out how to use the kinds of tools that designers have at their disposal.
Amy: Obviously the clients that seek you out are familiar with your work and are seeking you out for that. But do you find you’re still sort of swimming upstream when it comes to the general public and having to get buy-in on some of the features that would make your space…
Suchi: You know, one of the things I realized very early on in my practice is that you can design everything you want, but then when bioengineering happens, or budget cuts have to happen, the design still has to be powerful if all you had left at your disposal was paint. So honestly, I still carry that but there are always factors, whether it’s code that’s requiring a certain kind of thing or it’s a budget or a schedule or a constructability issue, you know, do we have the right labor to provide this kind of thing? Can we actually get it? Does it work with all these other things? (Laughs) Can we maintain these materials? You know, there’s all these questions that happen. So, I think the best way to work with any of my clients is to say that this is always my ethos. This is the ethos that I’m going to bring to every decision. So I’m going to be looking at making every design decision that goes into the millions of design decisions that go into any project, small or big, with this ethos. And we’re going to put it foremost to try and figure out if our budget is $1, how are we doing this, and if our budget is $100, how are we doing this? And can we do it differently.
Amy: So we’re all working with the same north star.
Suchi: We’re always working with the same north star. It will only depend on the resources available to see what level you can take it to.
Amy: Yeah.
Suchi: And that’s true, for most things. And that’s actually how the world gets made, except that I always say, it’s just as hard to make something ugly as it is to make something beautiful, so God knows why there’s so many ugly things in the world. (Laughs) I don’t get it. It flummoxes me. I have no idea. It’s a lot of work to build something that’s ugly.
Amy: It’s a lot of work. (Laughs) But it’s a lot of work on the labor side, it might be less work on the design side, do you think?
Suchi: (Laughs) Yeah, I suppose you’re right about that.
Amy: It might be laziness on the design side.
Suchi: Yes. And you know, this is also… it’s not a very profitable strategy for our studio, but we certainly never stamp anything out. We’re not like, oh, we did that and we’re doing it again, you know? We have one retail client for whom we’re doing showrooms around the world and we’ve created a kind of brand identity that then adapts itself to different places and cultures and spaces and stuff. And that may be as close as we’ve come to maintaining a similar design language through different projects, you know, which is appropriate for that kind of client and that kind of space. But every space feels right. And the reason every space feels right is because we again take those same materials and we’re calibrating them. Where if in Sydney we have like 20 foot tall ceilings and in Chicago they are 10, we know how to work with that to still make you feel comfortable. Like at what height do things hang. Where are they spaced? Do we have windows? To be able to work with those kinds of ideas, to really still make sure that the brand ethos lives, the product is looking fabulous and at the same time everyone feels good the minute they enter the space. And the thing is, we all know that feeling. We know it.
Amy: We do know it. I don’t know that everybody knows that it’s possible through intentional design. I think a lot of people feel like it’s coincidental and that’s what I feel like is part of the power of this message, it’s like no, if we’re all thinking about it and designing intentionally for it, the agency is within our hands. We can do this. We can make a world that feels better for all of us.
Suchi: Yeah, or even parts of it. Like you can start with little pieces…
Amy: Start with little pieces, that’s how everything starts…
Suchi: Eventually they’ll come together…
Amy: Yeah. Yeah. (Laughter) But understanding that it can be done intentionally and you don’t have to leave it up to coincidence or happenstance. Quick thought experiment.
Suchi: Okay?
Amy: Let’s say there is a global community fund that is affording or has entrusted you to create a public space that’s more permanent, more architectural than an art installation, but the architecture typology is unspecified. You get to specify that. The only things in the brief is that it allows people to gather and it creates a sense of serenity, even sanctuary, interconnectedness and reverence for each other and our earthly habitat and maybe even transcendence. My question is: What’s your first reaction?
Suchi: Oh my god, dream project.
Amy: Okay?
Suchi: That’s my first reaction. (Laughs) Dream project.
Amy: Second question is: Do you take the project?
Suchi: Of course.
Amy: Third question: Where do you start? What are the first things that you start in terms of researching or concept development. What do you start unravelling?
Suchi: It’s so interesting because as you were talking about I already had an image popping up in my head for it. but you know, this happens to me…
Amy: Yes?
Suchi: I usually take that image, I put it away and then I go andlook at the actual site, wherever it’s going to be, see what the site has to say, see what the energy and vibration of the site is, how it’s connected to the city at large, let’s say, or not, or nature, the woods, what’s available, right? What are the resources, the actual endemic resources that we get to amplify, to create this kind of feeling that this image that popped up in my head had.
Amy: Can you describe the image that popped up in your head?
Suchi: Yeah, it was just… it worked itself into kind of a library actually.
Amy: Really?
Suchi: Yeah, but not like one filled with books and things, maybe there would be some books in it. But really one that allowed you to be a library of sensations and emotions and experiences and so we could all come together in this kind of way and then they could change, right, depending on what’s happening in the world and what’s current and what people need to feel and talk about and emotionally relate to, depending on what’s happening in their community or in their country, or those kinds of things. And within that, to have a kind of… a space for transcendence. I think that whole experience would be transcendent anyway, but to be able to create spaces that are for community and for being alone and for being able to see that interaction, make it very visible. That’s what popped into my head.
Amy: Oh, that’s a dream.
Suchi: I would do it in a hot second.
Amy: I want that to happen. (Laughter) Okay, I want to circle back to your childhood home. I’m glad you brought it up. And it was the epiphany that got this all rolling. I like to think of the exponential return on that one piece of architecture, right, because it fostered an architect from within it and that architect is now creating projects that make people feel better all over the world. And so the exponential good vibes from that one space, and generationally, is sort of the compound interest of what architecture can do.
Suchi: Yeah.
Amy: Can you describe for me that epiphany in a little more detail? I mean maybe contrast how you could see that other… your friends’ homes weren’t affecting them the same way or…
Suchi: It’s a little hard to explain…but I can go back to that moment in a hot second. I know exactly where in the house I was. I’d just climbed up these little few stairs and I was standing on this landing and the light was coming in from the left-hand side and we had a bigger open courtyard kind of space on the right-hand side. And I remember the temperature of the air, you know, I remember all of that. And I remember thinking, oh, wow, I am who I am because of all of this, right? Which isn’t a radical thought, necessarily, and it’s not that my friends didn’t feel that they were that in their homes, but I could feel the contrast. Like when you’re a kid all you do is like, you know, at least in my world, you were in your house or in your friend’s houses, you weren’t hanging out in the city, you know? So I would contrast it to my experiences in my friend’s homes. And I knew that in my house there was a certain different kind of a feeling because it was surrounded by gardens on four sides, you know. The person who designed it was highly influenced by Japanese influences, so it had a bit of that, you know? There was texture everywhere. The materials… my mother, who never went to school and somehow spoke seven languages and had incredible taste…
Amy: Oh my gosh! Wow!
Suchi: I get my design chops from her. And she created terrazzo that she had never seen out of leftover stone and stuff like that, you know?
Amy: Wow!
Suchi: I knew that it affected me in a way that my friends houses didn’t affect me, right?
Amy: Yeah.
Suchi: And certainly theirs affected them in a different way, but for me this was a big moment, a big feeling. And I didn’t even know what… I’d realized it was an epiphany maybe when I was in my 20s and I had my second one, or something, you know? (laughs)
Amy: Yeah.
Suchi: It’s like oh, that’s what that is. When something descends on you as the truth…
Amy: How old were you, did you say?
Suchi: About 10.
Amy: About 10…
Suchi: Yeah, and you don’t know, right? But you know it in the cells of your being, you know it’s true.
Amy: You know it in the cells of your being when you’re 10 or that young, you’re still kind of an amorphous, nebulous, becoming of what you’re gonna be. And so these experiences, you don’t have the hindsight on them to be able to label it an ‘epiphany,’ but it’s just such a clear description of how all the homes that all children grow up in are…
Suchi: Affect them.
Amy: Serving to affect them, yes.
Suchi: Yeah, which really brings that onus on us to make sure that all kids have exposure to great and inspiring space, you know? If it’s not possible to have that at home, then you have to be able to have that in your city.
Amy: Yes. Speaking of cities. I know you made a detour or you had a significant informative stop on your educational journey in Detroit.
Suchi: Yes! And very close to my heart actually. (Laughs)
Amy: I am born and raised in Ypsilanti, which is very close to Detroit…So I feel like I also share your love of Detroit. And when you talked about these spaces in your city that can shape you, I just would love to hear what you loved about Detroit?
Suchi: Well, actually what I loved about Detroit, and I was an immigrant, very young immigrant when I went to Detroit, right? So I didn’t know so many things. I had just learned to drive, Detroit was a great place to do that. (Laughter)
Amy: Yes, a good place for cars.
Suchi: But honestly it was such an amazing city to spend my formative years in and receive some formative education. And because it’s importance to the world is immeasurable. Like where the car came from, what the car did, to everything else is an incredible, incredible thing. And this city had such a feeling of history to it.
Amy: Yeah.
Suchi: And all of these like incredible buildings in it that were beautiful, even if it wasn’t at that time as accessible in some ways, in terms of public space that it is now, you know, where Detroit has reformed itself in so many ways. There’s so many incredible buildings now and all buildings are being refurbished and made beautiful again and it’s really wonderful to see the renaissance of it. But even at that time… it was also the first place I learned about jazz, you know, WDET was such a great radio… I mean just like everything, just opened up your mind, your brain to… it’s where I heard John Coltrane for the first time.
Amy: It’s got deep musical roots. It’s got…
Suchi: Deep design roots.
Amy: Deep design roots. It’s got a deep entrepreneurial or DIY scrappiness to it that means it’s always remaking itself.
Suchi: Yeah.
Amy: And it bears the scars of what its been through in a way that is, in many cases, quite beautiful, quite a badge of honor. In other places sad, but it doesn’t erase itself.
Suchi: No.
Amy: And I really appreciate that about it.
Suchi: Yeah, I do, I love going back there.
Amy: Yeah! I’ve lived in newer cities that were kind of, I don’t know, mostly strip malls or felt like they were all… and it just made me miss the depth and soul of Detroit.
Suchi: Yeah.
Amy: So anyway, thank you for going down that little love letter. (Laughter)
Suchi: I love that! I actually was super honored; I just gave a commencement speech at CCS in Detroit this year…
Amy: Oh wonderful.
Suchi: I love this blend of art and production and design and everything that the city offers. It was such a treat to be back there doing it.
Amy: Good. Okay, last question of the interview and it’s a very personal one, but related to your work still. You’ve been operating your studio, Reddymade, for 20 plus years, and you’ve done work, a body of work that your whole studio can be proud of, but that I’ve heard you describe as ‘spiritually sustaining.’ And that’s an amazing feat in and of itself. In all of that, how are you a good boss, mentor, coach and cheerleader to yourself? How do you take care of yourself in that venture and how do you not?
Suchi: That is an ever-evolving journey. You know that being the boss of anything is rather thankless, to some degree. When you’re the boss no one tells you you did a good job. (Laughs)
Amy: Right, nobody gives you a promotion or a raise…
Suchi: No one gives you a promotion, no one gives you a raise. (Laughs) No one says, “Hey, great, here, let me think of something else wonderful for you to do, let me pat you on the back and take you out to dinner.” No, no, that doesn’t happen. So it’s such a good question, how do I take care of myself. The work takes care of me. I will say that. The feeling that I get when… and we do this very carefully in the studio, we study the work very carefully, in three dimensions, so almost 100% of the time the built work represents what we imagined. And that feeling of being able to walk into it and see that, that is spiritual, that keeps me going until the next thing. And I don’t know about being a mentor to myself, I’m very lucky now to have some very inspiring people in my life who, by example, are mentors,. But I would say the work truly sustains me.
Amy: That is beautiful. When you need to lean on someone else, are you good at letting yourself do that?
Suchi: Yeah, I have some great friends, my family is wonderful. I have great people who show up when I need them. I always say the riches of my life are the people in it, to be perfectly honest. And I mean that in every way.
Amy: I see it, I hear it in your voice.
Suchi: It’s truly the truth. They are… the people in my life are my riches, that’s what I have. I’m not a millionaire, I’m not a billionaire, I’m not any of those things. (Laughter) But I do things I love and things that sustain me.
Amy: What’s on the horizon, a project you’re excited about or something that I and my listeners can keep tabs on and look out for?
Suchi: Well, there’s a ton of things on the horizon, particularly because we operate in so many typologies. We have an artwork coming up in, a bit far flung, it’s in Uzbekistan. There’s an art biennial that’s opening in Bukhara. We are creating a work in a courtyard of an old school, a madrasah, all these ceiling designs that are non-hierarchical, that will come together to reinvent a place of learning really, and to envelop you in kind of these patterns of abundance and protection that we feel people need. So the work is called Patterns of Protection. That’s opening early September. We have just completed exhibit design on a show about downtowns post-Covid, during Covid, post-Covid, that’s going to open at the National Building Museum in Washington, that’s opening late September. So anyone in D.C. can go see it. It’s a great show actually and the material is fabulous. Like really seeing what the pandemic did, and how it’s transformed the way we think about our cities. It’s going to be incredible. We just wrapped up some residential projects that I’m very excited about shooting, both interiors and ground-up house up in the mountains and one on the coast of California that we just shot. And a large project in India that’s a cultural project, that’s being built around commissioned artworks, so that I’m very excited. But that’s long term, that will take a year or two. So that’s on the horizon. And in the meantime we continue to make showrooms for a wonderful furniture client, human scale, around the world. And I’ve also created a whole network of women-owned practices, aiding us around the world in that, so that the brand is also changing how business is done. So…
Amy: Wait okay, I was about to say goodbye, but I…
Suchi: You were about to close up…(Laughter)
Amy: I’ve got to hear more about this wome- owned network around the world.
Suchi: You know, I was asked to do projects around the world and I said, can I find women owned contractors, architects, practices who would help us and they were very open to it, so that’s what we’re doing.
Amy: You are making the world a better place in every possible way Suchi Reddy, I am so delighted…
Suchi: Isn’t that what we’re here for? Isn’t that what we’re here for, Amy?
Amy: It is! It is! (Laughter) Anybody who listens to this will be touched and moved and so thank you so much for sharing your story and for impacting me.
Suchi: Oh thank you, I appreciate it, thank you so much for the thoughtful questions, I really do appreciate them.I appreciate you.
Amy: Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you like Clever, there are a number of ways you can support us: Complete our listener survey at the link in the description. Share Clever with your friends, leave us a 5 star rating, or a kind review, hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. For a transcript of this episode and more about Suchi, including links and images of her work, head to our website. Cleverpodcast. com. While you're there, check out our resources page for books, info, and special offers from our guests, partners, and sponsors, and sign up for our free sub stack newsletter, which includes news announcements and a bonus Q and a from our guests. If you like Clever, we could really use your support. You can share Clevver with your friends, leave us a five star rating or a kind review, support our sponsors, and definitely hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X. You can find us Us at Clever Podcast, and you can find me at Amy Devers. Clever is hosted and produced by me, Amy Devers, with editing by Mark Zurowinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anoushka Stefan, and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is a proud member of the Surround Podcast Network. Visit surroundpodcasts. com to discover more of the architecture and design industry's premier shows.
A Place for Being. Photo by Maremosso.
Greenwich Village Apartment. Photo by William Jess Laird.
Humanscale Shanghai Showroom. Photo by Seth Powers
Me + You DC. Photo by Alyssa Schukar
Salt Point. Photo by Ashok Sinha
Google Store Chelsea. Photo courtnesy of Google by Paul Warchol.
Salt Point. Photo by Ashok Sinha
Turbulence 2025. Photo by Gabrielle Beaumont
Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.
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