Lilly Saniel-Banrey

Designer of many things. Sowing joy and wellbeing into the details of everyday life. Currently at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. See a full scope of work including architecture, graphics, objects, and documents. Or just see my current projects.

Bleak + Extravagant


 Proposed 2018
Albiquiu, NM

Ohio State University
Studio by Kea Bea Jones


 Exploring an arrangement of both vast space and close relationships, this remote New Mexico compound of dwelling and yoga studio studies the extremities in the built environment. The project interfaces seemingly opposite conditions: the expanse of landscape and the object-ness of the house, the built and the unbuilt, the serious and the playful, the aimless and the directed, the individual and the collective. Through the careful study of color, changes in the landscape are reflected clearly through the passing of light through each day. Graphic representation becomes the main means of exploration and provides an opportunity to dwell on an inherent image-making process when designing buildings. Make it picturesque! In turn, the desert landscape and built environment expand into a larger dialogue of the intersection of image and architecture.

A mirage surrounds the buildings. What is fake, what is real starts to blur together.

Rosalind Kraus’s Sculpture in the Field provided a basis for understanding and situating this project between architecture and landscape. As such, movement through the site is choreographed to experience transitions from artificial to natural, exterior to interior, and land to water.