McCallum Industrial Pottery

What happens when an award-winning architect enters a ceramics studio?

Feb 06, 2026

Meet the Berkshires is officially launched today with our profile of Ann McCallum. You may know her as an award-winning architect working with Andy Burr at Burr and McCallum Architects in Williamstown, MA – but she’s also the artist behind McCallum Industrial Pottery. Is there overlap between architecture and pottery? How did she end up in the Berkshires? We spent a sunny winter morning in the studio with Ann at North Adams Clay and photographed her at work.

PB: Tell us a bit about your background, where you’re from and how you ended up here in the Berkshires?

AM: I was born in Montreal. I was Canadian, I’m now American. At the end of high school I went to an international school in Wales. I came back to Montreal and wanted to do architecture, so I went to the architecture department at McGill University and said I want to sign up. They looked at the A-levels I had and told me they were all in the wrong subjects. They said “You really should have been doing chemistry and physics.” I thought, chemistry and physics? I don’t want to do chemistry and physics. I want to do architecture. And so I didn’t pursue it.

PB: Thankfully that wasn’t the end of your architectural ambitions! What changed and how did you end up in the Berkshires?

AM: While I was an undergraduate I did economics and art classes and then I met Andy who was living in Montreal and practicing as an architect. He had already studied at Yale and told me that McGill’s architecture was within their engineering department and was a very different way of studying architecture. He thought I should go to Yale where it’s much more arty, and you don’t need chemistry. “You still need physics though” (everybody wants physics) – so I did a summer course in physics. I didn’t get in to Yale at first, it took me a while, but I did eventually and had three very good years there.

By this time Andy and I were married and we moved to New York and each got jobs with architects in New York. Three years after that our first child was born and we said it’s time to move to the country, back to where Andy grew up, where he has a farm. He was always going to eventually end up there and we’ve lived here in the Berkshires ever since.

Ann McCallum / McCallum Industrial Pottery

PB: We know you as an architect, but what is the origin story behind your pottery?

AM: The origin story is that I was in a museum store at the AGO, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto – and I saw this really cool platter. It was a square piece of steel with a slit, and they had taken the two pieces and put them together to make a shallow cone. You could see the overlap, it had two points, and it was on a little base – and I thought that was the coolest thing and I wanted to make one. I tried, and I asked my metal guy, “Can you do this?” “No, it’s going to be too difficult” he said. So I thought maybe I could make it in pottery. I signed up for a pottery class and drew what I’d seen to show the pottery teacher and said “I want to make this”, and rather than making me learn bowls and everything else first they said “Okay, we’ll do that!”. So we just did it right away, and I made my thing, and I really liked making it, and I liked figuring it out, and that’s how I started.

PB: What did working with clay open up for you, creatively?

AM: There’s something about the lack of precision, you can kind of ‘wing it’ which you can’t do in many things, like architecture, and that really appealed to me. You could sort of think about it as you work. A lot of people start without really knowing what they’re going to make but I almost always draw things ahead of time and plan them, so that’s a little different from a lot of people. I’m not quite as freeform as I’m saying.

PB: Am I correct in saying your work as an architect is creative? Would you agree with that?

AM: I’d say the whole field is creative but a lot of it is just drawing up something you have created. The creative part of it is probably 5%, and the rest of it is 95%. And with pottery, it’s the opposite, so 95% creative, 5% clean up.

PB: That’s so interesting, as a layperson I would think architecture has so much more than 5% creativity, but you have to solve problems to suit the site, please clients, and make something that they’re going to live in. There must be so many constraints in architecture, but here, you get to play.

AM: That’s true. In architecture there are compromises all along, but you know what’s really nice? When you’re working here your concentration is so intense that all your troubles are gone and disappear from your mind – the Japanese call it ‘the burning house’. You’re just working hard and that’s a very satisfying thing – to have that time when you’re not fretting about this and that.

PB: Have you thought much about where your architecture and your pottery style intersect?

AM: Probably a fondness for asymmetry. When you throw a bowl it’s pretty symmetrical, but mostly I make things that are not.

PB: I am reminded of agricultural shapes and industry in your work, and we can see the echoes of corrugated siding from your architectural designs in the ridges of your small white pots. You clearly love how shadow falls on the buildings that you design, and I don’t think it’s any accident that your small white pots looked really great with shadow falling on them in the same way.

AM: Yes! I think it’s subliminal influences, although my pottery doesn’t really look architectural. But you’re right. It’s all about light.

PB: Do you think your skills as an architect in understanding volume work to your advantage when you’re making these kinds of vessels? Things like ratios, proportions, thicknesses of walls – you must have this baked-in understanding that someone who is not an architect would not have at all.

AM: I’ll tell you one thing I think I have, and that’s an eye for when something looks right. So when I’m making those pieces, I cut them and I stand back and the neck is too long, or the neck is too short, or the beak is wrong, I fix it. I always fix it until it looks just right, until I think they look good and correctly proportioned and I think that’s something that I get from architecture.

PB: It’s similar for us with compositions in photography. I’ve heard it said that you can’t teach composition – it’s either something you get and understand or you don’t.

AM: Yes, and I find that very satisfying when I’m working here and I do something that looks wrong and I wonder why. But when I can find it and change it and it then looks right – that’s very satisfying.

PB: What’s a chop?

AM: You have to sign your work, so the last thing you do is you put your ‘chop’ on it. My first pottery teacher said, “You gotta get something that’s meaningful to you.” Most people just carve their initials into a piece of clay in reverse and then they push it down into the clay. But my grandmother gave me this little candlestick snuffer when I was about 7, so I use that to make a circle and then I do the side piece followed by a dot – and that’s my chop.

McCallum Industrial Pottery is available for purchase on Chairish and Etsy. Inquiries can also be made via burrandmccallum.com.

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