Pierce Erez-Henderson
is a multiscalar designer, builder, and urbanist, working at the intersection of technology, city-level physical/social infrastructure, and aesthetic intervention. His social-practice oeuvre includes a wide range of textual, physical, sonic, communal, and communicative projects that engage municipal-level stakeholders in regions he is intimately familiar with and systems he is invited to engage and support. He is currently pursing an master’s degree in City Design and Social Science at the London School of Economics. Pierce holds a master’s degree from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education in technology, education, and policy and a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art.
 

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Fanzine (present-2023) 
Co-founder leading product development for technology platform that curates deep-cuts across the internet.
We aim to build a digital platform that makes navigating indie creator economy easier for users and creators. Users can put together fanzines of their favorite creators so others can discover genres their friends and strangers love. Led product development, focusing on refining user experiences for more intuitive and useful interaction. Over 1,000 users have discovered and engaged with the platform.

Collaborator: Kabir Chibber (writer, filmmaker, and fellow co-founder)

Link:
fanzine’s website

Aural Architecture (2024)
Shortlist winner for the R3 Design Competition.

We proposed creating an aural system that is specific to its site. Using the region’s physical and sonic matter as the only materiality of the system, this intervention demonstrates how occupying interstitial public space with sound and acoustic design may enhance its utility.

Collaborator: Chris Cummins (sound artist and engineer)

Link:
Sample of proposed experience on SoundCloud

MonoMono (2024)
Patternless shirt iteratively built from terry cloth to create a structured, functional garment and a sketch for a sculpture

Bodies create a kind of dynamically rendered form dependent on inumerable minutae: whether the person is tired and sweating, striding to the subway against the wind, hunched over a park bench eating a meal. It creates a kind of generative plasticity. If you squint, the garment can shift from a purely functional object, and become a continous intervention making very small incisions upon our normative routines. This is different from fashion in that the latter necessarily collapses back into our world, albeit poetically. This is a sketch for a sculpture.

Neighborbuoy (2023)
Proposal to Community Board 8 for developing a social exchange and community- building platform in the middle of 3rd Avenue, between 86th and 87th Street.
A tactical and temporary series of structures that serve a dual purpose: primarily, these structures are designed as dynamic platforms to facilitate inclusive dialogue between neighborhood stakeholders. Then when not actively used for events, these structures transform into ‘public third spaces’ - accessible, welcoming, and open to all community members. 


Collaborator: Elif Erez-Henderson (architect)

Field Work (ongoing)
Consistent praxis-building, (purposefully) never renumerated.
Selected previous. Led volunteer team at PS/IS 366 - Washington Heights Academy, every Saturday. 
Supported three architects in the design and build of a fully adaptive reuse bothy; the architects often brought their children to the construction site, engendering opportunities for pedagogical experimentation in an informal learning environment.

Collaborators: Manuel Estrella (Dean of Culture at Washington Heights Academy), volunteers | Elif Erez-Henderson, Cynthia Deng, Christian Hart Nakarado (architects)

Creative Center of North Carolina (2020-22)
Trustee of nonprofit led by networks of community leaders in Winston-Salem and dedicated to providing capacity and support to the creative assets in our community.
As the stewards for our community’s cultural infrastructure, we organized civil society, inventoried the city’s organizational resources across sectors with experts, and convened dozens of public and private stakeholders for equitable economic development. Our motivation was to build a more adaptive, creative, and resilient Winston Salem. 

Collaborators: JD Wilson (President, Chair of Board of Directors), seven trustees and dozens of advisors and committee members

Addressing the Future of Work in Winston Salem by Strengthening its Education System’s Public-Private Relationships (2021)
Policy brief delivered to mayor Allen Joines and county manager J. Dudley Watts of Winston-Salem.
In a four-month-long policy research project, we devised a policy strategy brief that emphasizes leveraging the economic and social power of existing city assets, using municipal-funded social infrastructure, to enable workforce resilience for workers without college degrees.

Collaborators: Beatriz Alqueres (Harvard Kennedy School), Daniel Martinez (Harvard Graduate School of Education), and John Ketcham (Harvard Law School), Prof. Dr. Peter Blair (advisor)

What about Design? Understanding the Biden Win From an Aesthetic Perspective (2021)
Op-ed published by the Harvard Kennedy School Review on the aesthetic dimensions of the US 2020 general election.
By taking an aesthetic perspective on the conditions of presidential electoral success in the US, my op-ed outlined the pandemic’s dampening effects on the public displays of persuasion, conventional in peacetime, and argued that this subsequently inhibited Trump and Biden campaigns’ abilities to design their messages. 

Collaborator: Derrick Flakoll (editor)

Link: SHORENSTEIN CENTER ON MEDIA, POLITICS, AND PUBLIC POLICY

Soft House (2019)
A do-it-yourself music venue in Station North, Baltimore, MD, hosting artists and music collectives from Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. Bi-weekly events with 50-250+ attendance.

This project sat within interstitial space. It was entirely cooperative, with revenue exclusively going towards the artists and volunteer labor (via three co-founders) supplying the management and organizing of the venue and artist network. My partners and I flourished, in part, by simply reanimating existing social infrastructure: the original Soft House, launched in the 2000s, achieved significant regional notoriety in the East Coast US experimental underground music scene. Then the building itself, the Copycat, factory-turned-artist-community, changed Baltimore’s zoning code through its successful modeling of alternative ways of living and working.

Collaborators: Nikilad (Co-founder, music collective leader), DJ Shshunj (Co-founder)

Into Ante (2018)
Sculpture tracing the architecture and negative space of a renovated train station.
One-thousand-two-hundred-fifty-two feet and five inches of SPT-2 cable wire, connecting by plug and socket approximately every 200 feet, contoured the architecture of sprawling hallways, galleries, closets, and foyers in a train station-cum-sculpture department. At one end, a forgettable red marquee light bulb blinked with a slow, arrhythmic beat, while at the other end and two floors up, an Arduino, operating a relay, instructed the bulb to communicate with exhibition visitors via Morse code.