Sam Naylor

Sam joined Utile in 2022 as a project architect. He has a particular focus on housing, crafting work that maintains a quality of beauty, dignity, and anonymity from the scale of both the bedroom and the block. At Utile his project work spans multi-building developments, urban infill schemes, zoning toolkits, and both market-rate and all-affordable projects. As a member of the internal housing research team he develops workflows, standards, and inquiries into housing best practices. Sam is committed to challenging the way we build and regulate housing design. He sees our homes and housing fabric as a result of deliberate cultural choices—ones that we all can be a part of evolving to better provide more delightful and dense dwellings.

Sam is a co-editor of “The State of Housing Design, 2023”, a compendium of contemporary national housing architecture published by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. He is also a Druker Traveling Fellow undergoing a multi-year research project into the design of cooperative housing around the world. Prior to Utile, Sam has worked on Passive House envelopes, affordable multi-family housing, mixed-use urban developments, new models of education, street furniture, airport urbanism, the future of baseball, hyper dense workplaces, custom woodworking, & community centered landscapes at various firms in Boston, Los Angeles, & New Orleans. He holds professional architecture degrees from Tulane University with honors and a post-professional design degree from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design with distinction. In addition to practice and research, Sam has taught design studios on housing, co-founded a venture on collective housing maintenance through MIT Design X, has edited multiple design publications, and is a published author.