gray_matter(s) is a design collective spanning the fields of architecture, urban design, user experience, installation art, performance, and digital media.  

We are choreographers of social experiences, engaging the physical and virtual performance of material, media, and bodies in space. As why-askers and yeasayers, we shy away from either/or to embrace the both/and. 

Our recent projects engaging housing, community, gender, data, reuse, climate, and race have offered us opportunities to hone our design process and envision an elevated future. Our extensive experience in cultural, residential, and media developments give us the expertise to see our visions into reality.

gray_matter(s) is licensed to practice architecture in New York State and has been a certified WBE since 2022.

Our team:

  • Merica May is dedicated to her studio practice, research, teaching, and community. Building on her first career as a ballet dancer, she is interested in bodies, time, movement and the power of architecture as a social agent.

    Merica May gained her architecture experience during a decade at the multi-disciplinary studio Diller Scofidio and Renfro (DS+R). There she led and helped build a range of cultural and institutional projects, including the 250’ sculptural Park Union Pedestrian Bridge in Colorado Springs, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Museum, the top-floor event space at the Shed in New York City and the winning competition entry for the Adelaide Contemporary in Australia.

    She is committed to her community, serving on the boards of Citygroup (a city-activist-art-space that was recently awarded the ArchLeague Prize), the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative, and Junior Boards of American Ballet Theatre and Kaatsbaan (a cultural arts center and artist residency space in upstate New York). She is a steward in 6BC and La Plaza Cultural community gardens and teaches architecture at the City College of New York and the Pratt Institute. She is a licensed Architect in New York State.

  • Soerynn Kim is a licensed architect with a wide range of international experience working on civic buildings.

    After graduating with a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University, Soerynn began her career at Skidmore Owings and Merrill, designing the base building and public spaces of New York's One World Trade Center. Her extensive research, focused on the optical properties of architectural materials, helped develop its bespoke external-inner cladding systems.

    At Diller Scofidio and Renfro, she was an Associate and a Senior Architect for the Shed, a movable art and performance space, seeing it to completion through stages of  design and construction. Afterwards, she took on the role of lead designer and project manager for Microsoft's multi-programmed workplace center, a complex and fast-paced project for its tech campus in the Seattle region. Prior to DS+R, Soerynn worked with Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano at his Paris and Genoa workshops, gaining significant experience practicing in Europe.

    She teaches courses in architecture and design at the Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design.

  • Travis Fitch is a New York-based architect, artist, designer, and educator. His work explores the intersection of spatial design, traditional craft, computational geometry, and 3D printing technologies.

    His designs have been exhibited at Cooper Hewitt, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MFA Boston, and Mana Contemporary, and reside in the special collection of The University of Manchester. Collaborations with threeAsfour and Kaimin have appeared in NYFW and received press coverage in Vogue, Dezeen, and more. He has consulted on projects for Stratasys, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Lotus, Chanel and Balenciaga.

    Travis earned a B.Arch at Cornell University before joining Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and has since independently overseen multiple residential and commercial projects. In 2017 he launched Superpattern, a collection of intricately structured lighting and jewelry. He is a founding professor in the Parsons Textiles MFA program and served as a juror for the 2022 Cooper Hewitt Design Awards. In 2020 he received a research grant from the Center for Craft, and the resulting work was featured in the 2022 showcase Material Reasoning.

    He was raised outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Our advisors:

  • Ebbie Wisecarver is WeWork’s Chief Design Officer, responsible for leading the physical product's creative direction, strategy, and development. This includes overseeing revenue-generating add-ons within the physical product and overseeing the company-wide capex budget. Since joining the company in 2015, she has held multiple regional positions, including Japan, China, Australia, and India, along with global roles. Previously, Wisecarver held positions at prestigious design firms Diller, Scofidio + Renfro New York and Steven Holl Architects. She holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and has participated in numerous traveling exhibitions and fellowships, including a competitive summer internship at Takenaka Corporation in Osaka, Japan. A strong advocate for gender equality, Wisecarver currently serves as the executive sponsor of the company's employee resource group, Women of WeWork, and is on the board of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, which focuses on gender equity in the design and construction industries through research and education.

  • Charles Berman is an Associate Principal at Diller Scofidio + Renfro. He attended Arizona State University and received a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been practicing architecture for over 30 years. Berman is a senior member of the design team of The Shed (7,400-18,500 sqm), a new center for artistic invention in Hudson Yards. As the Senior Technical Director on the project, he led The Shed development including the façade and the resolution of many of The Shed’s complex technical systems. Berman specializes in façade design and has worked as a façade consultant at Front, Inc. and R.A. Heintges & Associates. Prior to that, he spent 9 years at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, where he led the design for the new headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Beijing, the new headquarters for the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Berman received a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and received a Bachelor of Science in Design from Arizona State University. Berman teaches a technical elective on building envelopes at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.

  • Alyssa Lewis is a design architect at Robert A. M. Stern Architects. She is a first-generation immigrant who attended New York City College of Technology and received a Master of Architecture from the Bernard and Ann Spitzer School of Architecture.

    With ten years in the architecture field, she has worked with the J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures on research funded by JP Morgan Chase that conducted urban data analysis which utilized air rights, unused FAR, for potential reparative development in Harlem. She worked with Columbia University and CAPA Heat Watch on the collection of environmental data for the development of heat maps of New York City, finding heat related vulnerabilities in neighborhoods as a result of climate change. She facilitated a partnership between East New York Restoration LDC, Department of Design, and Construction’s STEAM, where she developed a ‘Green Champions’ Renewable energy course, educating high school students throughout New York City on the growing green industry, and exposing them to alternative career paths and possibilities. Alyssa was a Graduate Researcher for the Research Foundation of The City University of New York, where she created the graphic standard for visualizations of the energy systems within buildings using 2D and 3D software. She worked as an Energy Code Analyst for the NYC Department of Buildings, where she documented alterations between the previous and upcoming energy codes that hope to reduce the emissions by the city’s largest buildings forty percent by 2030. In her capacity as a designer Alyssa worked for Diller Scofidio + Renfro on a mixed-use adaptive reuse project in Paris. Now at RAMSA, Alyssa specializes in interior and exterior luxury architectural projects with a focus on adaptive reuse, mixed use/ residential, and houses.

  • Suhee Oh is a licensed architect who brings extensive experience in commercial and civic-scale projects.

    Suhee's notable projects include the Washington D.C. Union Station Master Plan, an $8.8 billion redevelopment plan for a multimodal transportation hub and a destination for shopping, dining, art, and entertainment. She also led the Redevelopment of Fordham Plaza in the Bronx, an urban design transforming an existing Metro North train station plaza into a vibrant civic destination with retail and a farmers market. In both cases, Suhee played a key role at Grimshaw Architects.

    Suhee is passionate about leveraging technology to improve the built environment. She has successfully implemented design standards and processes by incorporating innovative design and construction technology at two hyper-growing Real Estate startups, namely WeWork and CloudKitchens.

    Suhee holds a Master of Architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

  • gray_matter(s) grew out of obj, a 12+ year collaboration between Yushiro Okamoto, Ryan Botts and Merica May Jensen. Working together at Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), they took projects — ranging from cultural and institutional projects like the award-winning US Olympic and Paralympic Museum, the Shed, and MoMA, to residential homes — from concept to construction. Together as obj, they won NYC’s Small Lots Competition and were a finalist for Atlanta’s Legacy Makers Memorial.

    past collaborators - Paul Laroque, Angie Widjaja, Bo Liu, Soerynn Kim, Andrea Solk, Alice Colverd, Patrick Di Rito, Drew Tyndell, Sophie Pennetier, Shota Vashakmadze, Emily Martin, Alessa Rogers, Travis Fitch, Lindsay Kunz, Andy Kim, Massi Surratt, Keshav Ramaswami, Matthias Peltz, Olen Snow, Mike Robitz, Alice Chai, Andrew Beck, Lot-ek, Zach Mulitauaopele, Helena Urdaneta, Only Egbochue, Michelle Shin, Alexsa Ortiz-Reyes, Kuki, Jorge Ramirez-Escudero, Leeland McPhail, Kim Wadelton, Theodore Ullrich, Rui An, WenJun Song, Jennifer Rogers, Ash King, and others.