Elsa MH Mäki

Elsa MH Mäki is a designer/teacher/writer in Brooklyn who comes from Finnish, Armenian, and Anishinaabek family. Her practice includes cartography, model-making, immersive theater, and architectural design. Elsa's drawing and writing have been featured in the Avery Review, The Funambulist, Disc Journal, and volumes including Non-Extractive Architecture (2021), Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Siddiqi, 2023), Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common (2024), and Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design (2024). She has degrees in architecture from Columbia University – where she received the Marcia Mead Design Award – and Harvard GSD. Elsa is an editor with Avery Review and has held design and teaching positions in Minnesota, Massachusetts, and New York. She is Assistant Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia GSAPP.

Projects

67 projects

Projects

Take Back the Land

Protest Fields

Education, Institutions, and the Path Forward

Building in the Mamdani Administration

Design Educators Roundtable

San Diego Museum of Art Accessibility

WashU Accessibility

Portland Community College

Greenland Bund Centre

Willamette Falls

Tribal Housing Charrette

Settler City Limits

EP Admin. Center

EP Theater and Athletic Center

Community Ed. Center

Westwood-Edgewood School

Hidden Oaks School

Twin Oaks Theater

Grainwood School

Jeffers Pond School

Red Nation Podcast: Building Solidarities

Art of a Movement

Sklarek Lecture

Now What?!

Design Voices Podcast: HIDC

Petro-Biennial Complex

Before you were here

Water Research

Perfume Logistics Research

The World Around: Land in Focus Foreword

Temporary Logics of Extraction

The Queer House

Northern Spark

Material Acts

Standing Rock Syllabus

Shinohara's Mushrooms

Ruines

WASTE Residency

Oddity #2

Non-Extractive Architecture

Meeting House

Making Inclusive Museums Now

Interior Provocations

Healthy Housing for Native Communities

Generic Arts

Falls Restoration

Empire's Tracks

Ecologies, Agents, Terrains

Disc Journal

Diorama

Data Pair

Dance Machines

Dadaab Commons

Cruises & Data Research

Building Backward

Bloodless

Bathhouse

Artifact #1

Architectures of Care

Architecture of Migration

Jr. Architects

Architecture and Extraction

African Community Center of Lowell

Oddity #1

Artifact #2

Sport Shed

Resources for an Urban World