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Gluten is Julia McConnell and Paige Davidson, with a rotating cast of collaborators. We’ve been making houses, installations, short films, branding, packaging, books, animations and furniture since 2022.
Why the name Gluten? Mainly because it doesn’t sound like a firm. It sounds elastic, connective, maybe even a little off-limits in a world of 1:1 naming conventions. The projects that follow stretch across scales and platforms, never quite fitting into one category.
We like the mess in-between: where architecture turns into branding, where films behave like buildings, where graphics feel spatial. Design, for us, is sticky, unpredictable, occasionally messy. The studio moves between plywood and pixels, construction sites and classrooms, digital workflows and analog mess. Sometimes what we make looks like client work, sometimes it looks like research, usually it’s both.
We’re constantly making more, this website shares the work we’ve made so far.
Julia McConnell is a designer, educator, and filmmaker whose work operates at the forefront of design, visualization, and emerging technologies. She is a co-founder of Gluten and currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Practice at Virginia Tech's School of Architecture. Julia received her Master of Architecture with distinction from SCI-Arc and a BA in Architectural Studies from Mount Holyoke College. She has previously taught across undergraduate and graduate programs at SCI-Arc and the University of Arkansas.
Her work focuses on realizing the intangible through architectural, filmic, and technological interventions. At Gluten, her work examines the boundaries between architecture, media, and cultural production, with research exploring the intersections of AI, storytelling, and the built environment.
She has previously worked at firms including Woods Bagot, Landry Design Group, and TWA, where she developed projects across a range of scales, from temporary exhibitions and scenography to urban-scale infrastructure and architecture.
Paige Davidson is a designer, educator, and co-founder of Gluten whose work examines how architecture circulates today as built space, image, media, and cultural artifact. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech's School of Architecture. Her research examines what happens when buildings are encountered through screens first and bodies second, and how that condition reshapes design, materials, and perception.
Davidson received her Master of Architecture from SCI-Arc and her BA in Architectural Studies from the University of Illinois. She has previously taught at SCI-Arc, UCLA, and the University of Arkansas. Her work has received multiple honors, is held in the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt, and has been exhibited at the National Building Museum and Salone del Mobile.
Her practice moves between research and building, understanding architecture as a spatial discipline that is always mediated, negotiated, and shared. Prior to Gluten, Davidson worked at Snarkitecture in New York City as a Project Manager, developing large-scale exhibitions, installations, buildings, and furniture.
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