Obstructures

Hall graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture in 2000 from The University of Tennessee College of Architecture and Design. After working in various firms in Knoxville, Baltimore and Boston, he attended Harvard Graduate School of Design receiving a Master of Architecture in 2003. After he completed his graduate studies he returned to Baltimore with a thirst to build that was satiated by the firm RTKL allowing for the realization of multiple award winning projects to include the “Gateway” Dormitory at the Maryland Institute College of Art amongst others.

Many years of academic and unrealized projects resulted in a thirst for the consequences of making resulting in first aluminum guitars, drum kits, and amplifiers were completed as the tools for a band called New Brutalism. Theses designs along with other installation based projects, and obtuse musical exploits known as the ‘Brut Unison’ resulted in a loose collective friends turned collaborators that would five years later become Tacticalworks, and then reformed in Knoxville Tennessee as Obstructures in 2008.

While Tennessee is not truly home, it was the place he resided the longest after countless moves in a military family to various suburban no-places and sterile outposts. The spare aesthetics and utilitarian nature of military hardware combined with the banality of the spaces he grew up in lead to an infatuation for brutality, a penchant for minimalist heroics, and a fascination with pragmatic ugliness.

For Hall, Obstructures is night work as his days are spent in the world of academia. After years of practice he accepted a position at the University of Tennessee College of Architecture and Design where he taught for six years resulting in many low-tech design build projects made from found materials for minimal budgets.

Getting something from nothing is an obsession for him. Hall’s other main line of research is the work of deceased Swedish brutalist masters such as Sigurd Lewerentz and Bernt Nyberg. Hall’s interest in a meaningful and honest architecture breeds a fascination in bygone archetypes, the machine age, and a cynical approach to the valorization of the new.

Hall currently teaches full time at the Auburn College of Architecture Design and Construction, resulting in all three agents of Obstructures residing in different states.