Associate Professor
Clay Odom is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is a core faculty member in the Interior Design Program. He is a graduate of Texas Tech University College of Architecture and Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. His professional experience includes work with internationally recognized architecture and interior design practices, including SHoP Architects and Studio Sofield, as well as the fashion house LUCA LUCA. He is an NCIDQ-registered interior designer, and is co-founder and principal of Plume Design Lab, LLC, an Austin-based public art, interior design and architectural practice.
Clay’s academic, professional, and creative work operates across interior design, architecture, art, and advanced modes of design production. His design practice has received numerous awards, including a Texas Society of Architects Studio Award and an Architizer A+ Award for Regolith House. His recent work includes the design and completion of a ground-up private residence in Austin, Texas, as well as a range of public art, exhibition, and installation projects. These include Plume, a permanent public art installation at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, and Flowering Phantasm, exhibited in Amsterdam, Enghien-les-Bains, France, and Hong Kong. His design work has been exhibited and presented in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
As an educator, in addition to his current position as Associate Professor at The UTSoA Clay has taught at The University of Texas at Arlington, The New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Texas Tech University. His teaching and research are closely integrated with his active design practice and are understood as forms of design-based scholarship. His pedagogical work investigates the interior not simply as a bounded spatial condition, but as an active field of relations among bodies, materials, objects, environments, technologies, infrastructures, and larger ecological and urban systems.
Clay’s research initially developed through the framework of Productions, an ongoing inquiry into how subjective spatial, experiential, atmospheric, and para-cinematic effects—including atmosphere, immersivity, sublimity, and delight—can be generated through objective processes of design, fabrication, assembly, and installation. Productions positions interior design as both a critical and speculative practice, connecting interiority and experience to material systems, computational processes, fabrication techniques, and modes of spatial production.
Building on theoretical and historical relationships to the avant-garde interior design, art, and architectural practices of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Productions reframes Buckminster Fuller’s question, “How much does your building weigh?” through the question, “What does your project produce?” This shift moves attention from the building as a static object toward the effects, relations, and conditions generated through design. Within this framework, form, material assembly, light, sound, movement, time, and interaction become interconnected components of a larger spatial ecology. Design operates through diagrammatic and systematic processes that organize materials, operations, and interactions while remaining open to emergent conditions and unforeseen effects.
This research has increasingly developed toward questions of relation, adaptation, and complex systems, with particular attention to the interior as both an objective spatial condition and a subjective field of experience. Clay’s current research extends this trajectory through Living Systems, an investigation of the interior as an adaptive urban-ecological system. Here, design is understood less as the imposition of discrete objects or predetermined programs and more as a means of identifying, activating, and transforming existing relations among bodies, buildings, cities, materials, resources, infrastructures, and environments. The work considers adaptation as both a design method and an ecological ethic, positioning the interior as a critical disciplinary framework through which larger environmental and urban systems can be engaged.
Across these areas of research, Clay works with analog and digital computation, advanced fabrication, installation, and, more recently, artificial intelligence. These tools are considered not simply as means of representation or production, but as methods through which design can interrogate complexity, generate relations, and produce new spatial and material conditions. His work is particularly concerned with the ways that interiors operate within increasingly complex interfaces between human perception, material agency, architectural and urban systems, and natural environments.
Clay’s scholarly and creative research has been developed through design projects, exhibitions, publications, teaching, conferences, and symposia. He was co-chair of the 2019 ACADIA (Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture) Conference and the 2026 Interior Provocations Symposium, and co-chaired, curated, and designed the exhibition and symposium Architecture After A.I.. This, the first symposium of its kind, dedicated to emerging field of Artificial Intelligence in Architecture and Design was held at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, and subsequently exhibited at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has presented his design-based research and pedagogy on Living Systems internationally, including most recently in Australia as part of the ACSA International Conference. His recent creative work includes the exhibition Meteorological Imaginaries, as well as ongoing investigations into atmosphere, climate, environmental systems, and spatial experience.
Together, Clay’s design oriented teaching, research, and speculative practice position interior design as a critical mode of inquiry—one capable of operating simultaneously through material production, spatial experience, technological systems, and ecological relations. His work seeks to expand the disciplinary agency of the interior by examining how design can produce not only spaces and objects, but also relations, effects, interactions, and adaptive systems.
EDUCATION
- Master of Architecture, Texas Tech University
- Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design, Columbia GSAPP
