Kinneymorrow Architecture

We are a small design firm making interesting spaces for interesting people. Give us a shout!

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Awards: 

2017 Texas Society of Architects Design Award - Kane Street Office

2015 Houston AIA Design Award, Renovation/Restoration - Kane Street Office

2015 Houston AIA Design Award, Interior Architecture - Kane Street Office

2015 Preservation Houston Good Brick Award - Kane Street Office

2014 Houston AIA Design Award - Daryl Howard Art

2013 Houston AIA Design Award - Crockett Street House

2010 Preservation Houston Good Brick Award - Kane Street House

About:

“Michael Morrow’s eponymous architectural practice, Kinneymorrow Architecture, is one of several small, reasonably new studios that should gain enough momentum to redefine the staid Houston architectural scene in coming years. What sets this cohort apart from its peers is the intellectual rigor of its design methodology. Rather than slapping together a collage of materials and boxy shapes—the kind that typically passes for modern architecture in the Houston market—Kinneymorrow’s designs arise out of a careful analysis of the program. These initial studies almost intuitively take the form of a diagram, with shades of the Beaux Arts era esquisse, a rapidly drawn sketch containing the big idea (or ideas) that guides the project to completion. Coupled with this is an unusually pronounced contextual sensitivity that is all the more remarkable considering that Houston, table-flat and sprawling messily over the Gulf Coast plain, is by no means considered a city where architecture has served its traditional role of spatially defining the urban environment or of even making a mark on public consciousness. These two tendencies produce thoughtful, modest, and witty projects that—despite their oft-diminutive size and small number—are immensely satisfying on many levels.



Morrow is a graduate of Rice University, studying there in the late 1990s and early 2000s when it was headed by the Swedish polymath Lars Lerup, perhaps best known as a writer of marvelous essays that speculate in a simultaneously poetic and bemused fashion on the current state of the contemporary city. In 1994, Lerup described Houston in the essay Stim and Dross, (required reading for all Rice students at the time): “The European metropolis-without-crowds has skipped westward while radically transforming itself into a new creature: leaner, meaner, and more superficial, but harder to catch, at once simpler and less bearable to live in.” Kinneymorrow, now about a dozen or so years out of school, is doing the hard work of turning such ideas into an architecture inflected by the experience of living in this ephemeral city and it is exciting to see.”



Koush, B. (2016, July). Studio Visit – Kinneymorrow. The Architect’s Newspaper, 16.