Anyone who’s ever watched a single game of American football, which is notorious for its unapologetic, helmet-clashing violence, knows that players aren’t in it forever. The average NFL player retires before they hit 30. When they do, many pursue football-adjacent careers in coaching, scouting, or sports media—but very few choose to go to architecture school.
Michael Bennett is an exception. The Super Bowl champion and three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, mostly for the Seattle Seahawks, hung up his cleats in 2020 at age 33. Since then, he has studied design at Seattle’s Heritage School of Design, then architecture at the University of Hawaii, and he is launching his own practice called, Studio Kër, next month.
With Studio Kër (which means “home” in Senegalese, where Bennett’s ancestors are from), the football-player-turned-designer wants to break free of architectural conventions and write a new path for himself and the people who will come after him. “Black people, we have to create a pipeline of next generation of thinkers,” he says.
Bennett has learned all about Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, but he doesn’t necessarily look up to them. Instead, he admires the American activist Angela Davis, and the influential leader Booker T. Washington who famously preached a self-help philosophy, urging African Americans to elevate themselves through hard work in order to gain the esteem of white society.
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