Laura Walker

Activist, Architect, Artist, Business leader, Connector, Designer, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur

Laura Walker is an architect and artist practicing in Detroit, Michigan. She received the AIA Detroit Young Architect of the year Award in 2019, and was featured in Crain’s 2022 Notable Women in Construction, Architecture, and Design and Crain’s 2020 Notable Women in Design. Laura is co-founding Owner of Other Work, an arts-based experimental studio focused on architecture and city-making that promotes liberation and justice through spatial agency. Her twenty years of professional and academic experience ranges across all scales and typologies -- from small-scale, design-build installations and commercial spaces to expansive higher education, urban design, healthcare, workplace, and research laboratories. As a White, queer woman, she is interested in power struggle and alliance building in racialized territories and traditionally gendered spaces. Her work reimagines how human bodies perform and interact with one another and their surroundings. Engaged in transdisciplinary and inclusive collaboration, she designs participatory environments that radically affirm and celebrate marginalized human identities, expressions, and desires.

equitable city-making and participatory design

Climate justice is racial justice

architecture, desig, public art