Matthew Dutton is a Miami-based designer and M.Arch candidate whose work blends architectural research, material experimentation, and digital fabrication. His thesis, Who Killed the Brick?, traces the cultural, industrial, and political life of brick—from hand-made craft to modern propaganda—framing materials as actors with histories and agency. Alongside research, Dutton maintains an active design-build and ceramic practice, creating sculptural work and architectural proposals that merge narrative, climate responsiveness, and local context. Recent projects include Garden Villas, Station 24, and The Machine. Across scales, his work asks how materials remember—and how architecture can help them speak.
STUD
IOMT
INTERIORS. SCULPTURE SITE-SPECIFIC WORKS
Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, New York
Bloom is a site-specific installation composed of approximately 200 handmade ceramic flowers planted within the landscape of Sylvester Manor, a former plantation on Shelter Island.
The work considers cultivation as both a physical act and a metaphor for endurance. The flowers emerge from land shaped by generations of labor, including the work of enslaved and indentured people whose lives and contributions are inseparable from the history of the site.
Rather than attempting to reconstruct those lives, Bloom creates a field of individual ceramic forms as a gesture toward presence, labor, and persistence. Each flower is made by hand and planted directly into the ground, allowing the installation to sit between sculpture, memorial, and landscape.
The project reflects on the contradiction between the beauty produced through cultivation and the systems of exploitation that made that cultivation possible. The flowers become markers of lives that continued to grow, create, work, and endure despite conditions of violence and abuse.
Bloom extends MT Dutton Studio’s ongoing investigation into material memory—using ceramic as a means of locating history within the physical landscape.
Shelter Island, New York
Cascade is an outdoor shower designed for a residential property on Shelter Island using reclaimed brick salvaged during the renovation of the existing house.
The project began with a simple material constraint: rather than discard the brick removed from the home, the material would be reused to construct a new architectural element within the landscape. The resulting shower transforms demolition waste into a tactile, semi-permeable enclosure that connects the history of the house to its next phase of use.
Brick walls are arranged to balance privacy with openness, allowing light, air, and glimpses of the surrounding landscape to pass through the structure. Water, masonry, and vegetation are brought into direct conversation, allowing the shower to weather and change alongside the site.
The project treats reuse not merely as a sustainability strategy, but as a form of material continuity. Brick removed from one part of the architecture is given a new function and identity rather than leaving the site entirely.
Cascade reflects the studio’s broader interest in material memory, adaptive reuse, and the capacity of architecture to preserve traces of what came before.
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
The Putnam Project began as a commission to develop a custom ceramic tile installation for the vestibule of a Brooklyn brownstone. As the project evolved, the scope expanded into a broader rethinking of the home’s interiors and exterior spaces.
The clients wanted to introduce greater character, color, and personality into a largely white-walled brownstone while preserving the architecture of the existing house. MT Dutton Studio developed a series of interventions across the residence, including the vestibule, powder room, offices, closets, lighting, material palettes, and furnishings, as well as the rear yard and native garden.
Rather than treating each room as an isolated design exercise, the project approaches the house as a collection of distinct but connected environments. Custom ceramic elements, saturated color, patterned surfaces, vintage and contemporary furnishings, and a complete lighting overhaul are used to create moments of contrast and identity throughout the home.
What began with a single ceramic intervention ultimately became a study in how material, color, light, and landscape can transform an existing residential interior without erasing its history.
Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami, Florida
Columns for Community was developed in response to an open call for a new entrance intervention at Bakehouse Art Complex in Miami.
The proposal reimagined the entry sequence as a ceramic architectural threshold composed of tiled masonry columns and a custom perforated gate. Rather than treating the gate as a purely functional boundary, the project transformed it into a highly visible civic and artistic element that could reflect the material experimentation taking place within the complex.
Custom ceramic tiles were designed to wrap the columns in a shifting field of color and texture, bringing the tactility and variation of handmade ceramics to the scale of architecture. The accompanying gate incorporated an organic, coral-like pattern that balanced security with transparency, allowing light, movement, and visual connection between the street and the courtyard beyond.
The project explored how relatively ordinary architectural elements—columns, walls, and gates—could become opportunities for public artwork and material expression.
Columns for Community reflects the studio’s broader interest in dissolving the boundary between architecture and sculpture, allowing ceramic to operate as surface, ornament, artwork, and building material simultaneously.
Coral Gables, Florida
The Brick Has Memory: A Material Archive of Labor, Violence, and Resistance investigates brick not simply as a building material, but as an archive capable of recording the social, political, and physical forces that shape it.
The project traces four forms of memory embedded within brick: the hand that makes it, the disasters produced by its extraction and manufacture, the displacement that follows its reuse and circulation, and the acts of resistance it can come to symbolize. Through historical research, architectural analysis, and ceramic fabrication, the thesis moves between sites including Haverstraw, St. Louis, and Stonewall to examine how a seemingly ordinary construction material can carry histories of labor, violence, migration, and queer resistance.
The resulting body of work includes handmade bricks, sculptural installations, ceramic flowers, fractured forms, and reclaimed symbols. Fingerprints, kiln scars, imperfections, and damage are treated not as flaws, but as evidence.
Rather than presenting brick as passive matter, the thesis positions material as witness—capable of holding memory long after the people and events that shaped it have disappeared.
The project established the foundation for Dutton’s ongoing practice as an architect and artist whose primary material is ceramic.
Chelsea Loft, New York
Wonky Chairs is a series of CNC-milled plywood chairs that explores the tension between digital precision and visual instability.
Designed through digital modeling and fabricated from sheet plywood using CNC routing, the chairs begin with the logic of repeatable, machine-cut components. That precision is intentionally disrupted through exaggerated proportions, irregular profiles, and unexpected shifts in geometry, producing objects that appear slightly off-balance while remaining functional.
The project investigates how computational fabrication can be used not only to optimize construction, but to introduce character, humor, and imperfection into everyday objects. Flat sheets are transformed into three-dimensional forms through a system of interlocking parts, making the method of assembly legible within the finished chair.
Rather than hiding the material or fabrication process, exposed plywood edges, joints, and layered profiles become part of the visual language of the work.
Wonky Chairs reflects an ongoing interest in using digital tools to produce objects that feel expressive rather than standardized—testing the boundary between furniture, sculpture, and architectural fabrication.
Miami Beach, Florida
The Sunscreen Tide is a landscape intervention situated along the water break line of Miami Beach, where ocean, sand, and human activity continuously overlap.
The project responds to the largely invisible ecological damage caused by sunscreen entering coastal waters by making that impact temporarily visible. An iridescent mark occupies the narrow and constantly shifting edge where swimmers move between land and sea—the point at which sunscreen is transferred most directly from the body into the marine environment.
Landscape, time, and human traffic become materials within the work itself. Waves redistribute the intervention, footsteps disturb it, and the movement of tides gradually pulls it into the surrounding sand. Its disappearance is not simply an effect of the environment, but an essential part of the piece.
As The Sunscreen Tide dissipates into the landscape, it mirrors the way the invisible consequences of our own actions so easily dissipate from our thoughts. Pollution may disappear from view, but its impact remains.
By locating the intervention precisely at this threshold, The Sunscreen Tide brings those consequences back to the forefront. The beach becomes more than a setting: it becomes an active medium through which visibility, disappearance, memory, and environmental responsibility are continually negotiated.