Our Team
Shannon Sumner
Co-Founder / Design Principal / Creative Lead
“Things get interesting when the rules blur and ideas wander off.”
Profile:
Shannon doesn’t just follow ideas—she flips them, tangles them, and tests how far they’ll stretch before something interesting happens. Architecture, for her, is part structure, part speculation, and part mischief. With a background in design, research, and environmental systems, she moves fluidly across scales—but gravitates toward the edge of the frame, where structure loosens and ideas start to misbehave. Her process is fast, physical, and joyfully off-center—designed less to deliver answers than to ask better questions.
At After Normal Studio, she shapes creative direction through intuition, precision, and a willingness to get things delightfully wrong before they’re right. She thrives in the unknown, the in-between, and the slightly off-kilter. Shannon doesn’t design to eliminate contradictions; she designs to live inside them—until something strange, sharp, and completely charming takes shape.
CV:
2025 “Generational Voice” award winner
University of Michigan
Texas A&M University
Ryan Garza
Co-Founder / Managing Principal / Execution Lead
“We’re not here to build the expected. We’re here to challenge it”
Profile:
Ryan’s architectural perspective was shaped in environments where innovation was imperative and execution carried weight . His design instincts were calibrated within systems operating at unimaginable speed—where legacy thinking held no currency, and architecture had to assert itself through clarity, rigor, and consequence. Those conditions refined a sensibility attuned to tension—where constraints are not barriers or boundaries, but structures themselves: the medium through which architecture takes form.
That foundation shaped more than a method—it shaped the ethos of After Normal. rejection of the binary logic often imposed on architecture: concept or construction, form or function, speed or precision. Ryan’s work is situated in the gray, where complexity is a condition, not a flaw—and where clarity comes not from choosing, but from holding opposing forces in deliberate tension. His work moves across scales and systems with precision, aligning vision and execution without dilution.
CV:
SpaceX
The Boring Company
Texas A&M College of Architecture