Katie Swenson

Katie Swenson a designer and writer, a community development and affordable housing practitioner, as well as yoga-addict and author. Her two 2020 books, In Bohemia and Design With Love - both about home, both about love - are told from a personal and professional views, understanding how to deliver architecture that promotes justice and human dignity and reflecting on the meaning of life and love. “Equal parts shepherd, colleague, and champion, Katie Swenson takes us on a rich and gratifying journey across the American landscape highlighting the immutable power of design. Opening space for architects, developers, communities, and individuals to tell their unique yet interconnected stories in clear, unambiguous terms, Swenson presents a powerful counter to the common claim that architects can’t be agents of social change. Such is the power of love. While Swenson and her cohort would never make this claim, if architecture is to have any hope of living up to its civic responsibility as a profession, this is a model of practice that must be embraced, supported, and as Swenson does with deft and grace, celebrated.” - Craig L. Wilkins, PhD, Author of Aesthetics of Equity and Diversity Among Architects “It is often said that the essential quality of all good art is truth. This is the truest book I have ever read. The ideas that began to flow from Katie Swenson's cracked open heart on the worst day of her life - and continued since - are nothing short of remarkable, and have deeply impacted everyone who has read them. This is a book about grief, but as much, about joy. It is a book about death, and about the beauty of life. It is a book about spaces - in our lives, in our relationships, in our homes, and in our hearts - and also a guide to seeing space not as inherently empty, but full, pulsing with life and magic and possibility. You will instantly feel in this lovely and gut-wrenching prose, forged in the fire of unflinching loss, that In Bohemia is mainline to the truth about life itself.” - Holly Sorensen, writer, producer, Hollywood showrunner