
As a Harvard Graduate School of Design Druker Fellow, Sam Naylor (MAUD ’21) traveled the globe to investigate cooperative housing, exploring more than 100 projects over three years. Simultaneously, Naylor worked as an architect full time, co-authored three major housing-related reports, and sustainably renovated a cooperatively owned triple-decker in the Jamaica Plains neighborhood of Boston. Uniting these endeavors and driving this improbably large aggregation of work is Naylor’s abiding interest in housing—what it is, and what it can be—alongside his conviction that research and practice enrich one another.

Naylor’s architectural studies began in 2011 at Tulane University’s School of Architecture, in New Orleans. This was less than a decade after Hurricane Katrina, and the school immersed students in the city’s reconstruction. “Because it was so hands-on, and we were building real things that would happen in different neighborhoods, the design-build program was a big part of what inspired my architectural thinking,” Naylor says. In addition to individual architectural interventions, “there was also a focus on the city itself, working with community members and rebuilding at multiple scales, in a really considered way that was engaged and ecologically specific.”
Following Tulane, from which he graduated with bachelor and master of architecture degrees, Naylor’s experience of thinking about design at multiple scales accompanied him to Los Angeles where he worked for a few firms “on a wide range of architectural projects, from the city scale down to furniture. Slowly,” Naylor recalls, “I became more political and wanted to understand the dynamics behind our cities and what makes it possible for things to happen. What hidden forces set up the game for us as architects? I was curious to see how I in my career, and architects and designers in general, could have more agency in establishing the rules of the game that we then play.” This thinking led Naylor to the GSD, where he began his post-professional MAUD studies in 2019.

Looking back, Naylor describes his two years as a GSD student as “a critical part of my career, a great time to slow down, read and research more heavily, and take classes in different disciplines.” By the second semester, Naylor found himself drawn to housing. “As a design area,” he explains, “housing embodies a lot of the elements in which I’m interested. Housing transitions scale; you have to think about the city, and also about the room and furniture scales, even door handles. It’s also extremely political; you have to be engaged in the world, thinking about the processes through which design and construction will actually occur.” Finally, “housing is intimately connected to our own lives,” Naylor says. “And with the current housing crisis, it is satisfying to work on an issue that matters. Designing housing for communities where I live or work or that I care about is extremely fulfilling.”
Fortunately, the GSD proved an excellent place for Naylor to explore housing as a student and beyond. Graduating from the MAUD program in 2021, Naylor was awarded the Druker Traveling Fellowship, which sponsored his three-year study of cooperative housing design, exploring models in nearly a dozen countries from Argentina to the Netherlands to Australia. Toward the end of the 2021, Naylor was also appointed a research fellow at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) where, with associate professor in practice of urban planning Daniel D’Oca and professor in practice of landscape architecture Chris Reed, he co-edited The State of Housing Design 2023, the first book in a new series that addresses issues related to residential design.

Meanwhile, Naylor joined Utile, a Boston-based firm founded by Mimi Love and Tim Love (MArch ’89, also a lecturer in real estate at the GSD). At Utile, Naylor is currently an associate with a focus on multifamily housing, as well as a member of the internal housing research team, which investigates housing and policy-related best practices. In October 2024, Naylor with Utile, JCHS, and the research center Boston Indicators released “Legalizing Mid-Rise Single-Stair Housing in Massachusetts,” a report examining the space-saving benefits of eliminating multiple-stair mandates in this building type. The single-stair report is the first step in “the harder work of making that regulatory change possible,” with Naylor now “meeting every week with people in co-development, housing advocacy, municipal policy, or the state legislature to talk about how we can make that happen.” In addition, Naylor is concurrently working with Tim Love, Amy Dain, and Camille Wimpe on Equitable Zoning by Design, a research project at Northeastern University that explores rezoning for multifamily development following MBTA guidelines, with findings to be released this month.

Concerning the potent mix of research and practice that comprises his career, Naylor feels fortunate to be a part of a firm that supports research and exploration. “It would be advantageous if more places we work supported these tangents because they enrich everything—your work, your connections, your design thinking. Research and practice improve each other,” Naylor affirms. “Research informs theory and then comes back into practice. It’s a form of testing ideas iteratively.”
This philosophy appears to hold sway in Naylor’s personal realm, notably in his very intentional living arrangements. Naylor, his wife Elaine Stokes (MLA ’16, DDes ’25), and a few friends cooperatively own a triple-decker house in Jamaica Plain. They purchased the property and have since embarked on a collective journey to decarbonize, renovate, and reside together, in their individual units, sharing building maintenance, some meals, and dog care responsibilities. Not coincidentally, during the years that Naylor traveled the globe to investigate cooperative housing projects, back at home he initiated his own—a true unification of research and practice.