Catherine Baker

Catherine Baker is the founder of Nowhere Collaborative, a woman-owned and place-based architecture practice formed in 2022 that addresses sustainability, incremental development, and community-based design. Her work is rooted in the intersection of the social and technical disciplines of architecture. Catherine has over thirty years of experience in community-based design in Chicago and she is now focused on applying this experience to understanding people and problems, making connections, and formulating equitable solutions to the development, design of buildings, and built-environments in a rural context. Catherine is an adjunct professor at IIT, regularly participates on design juries, and has been invited to speak at local and national conferences on housing and community-based design. She was a member of AIA’s delegation to the United Nation’s Habitat III in Quito, Ecuador, and she has presented on community-based design at the Danish Architecture Center in Copenhagen, Denmark.