Joshua Ramus is the founding principal of REX, an internationally acclaimed architecture and design firm based in New York City. Believing architecture should actively empower its users and communities—not simply be a representational art—Joshua’s work challenges and advances building paradigms and promotes the agency of architecture. This ethos guides his studio’s aspiration to produce inventive designs so functionally specific that they offer new and inspiring aesthetic experiences.

Recently completed work includes the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center in New York, New York, about which The New York Times architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman, raved, “Lower Manhattan could have hardly asked for a more spectacular work of public architecture;” The Lindemann Performing Arts Center at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, which, according to Sam Lubell in The New York Times, takes “theater architecture into new territory, pushing the notion of flexibility to its limits; to the point where you wonder if the whole idea of a theater—or any building for that matter—might be changing with it;” and 2050 M Street, a premium office building that hosts CBS’s Washington, DC bureau, which Josephine Minutillo, editor in chief of Architectural Record, declared “sits like a jewel in the city’s Golden Triangle business district.”

Joshua’s work under design or construction includes a pair of mixed-use skyscrapers in Perth, Australia; two residential towers on the Brooklyn waterfront, as part of the redevelopment of the iconic Domino Sugar Factory site; two hybrid retail and cultural hubs for Kia Motors in Seoul and Jeju, South Korea; an office tower in Brisbane, Australia; and the 4,050 m² (43,600 SF) Necklace Residence on Long Island, New York.

Seminal projects in Joshua’s continued advancement of architectural typologies include the AT&T Performing Arts Center Dee & Charles Wyly Theatre in Dallas, Texas; the Vakko Fashion Center & Power Media Headquarters in Istanbul, Turkey; and the Seattle Central Library in the State of Washington. Joshua led the Seattle Central Library—hailed by architecture critic Herbert Muschamp in The New York Times as “the most exciting new building it has been my honor to review in more than 30 years of writing about architecture”—while a founding partner of OMA New York (the firm he rebranded as REX in 2006).

Joshua’s projects have been recognized with top accolades from peer groups, including two American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Honor Awards, a U.S. Institute for Theatre Technology National Honor Award, an American Library Association National Building Award, Time magazine’s Building of the Year, the International Design Awards (IDA) Building of the Year, two American Council of Engineering Companies’ National Gold Awards, a Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat Award of Excellence, three Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize Outstanding Project Awards, listing in Architectural Digest’s AD100, and numerous state AIA, Society of American Registered Architects, ArchDaily, Architect/Progressive Architecture, Architect’s Newspaper, Architectural Review/MIPIM, Architizer, and Wallpaper* design awards. Fast Company named the firm one of the World’s 10 Most Innovative Companies in Architecture three times and ranked it No. 25 on its 2024 World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies list.

Joshua was the first American recipient of the Marcus Prize, the biennial international architecture award conferred by the Marcus Corporation Foundation and the University of Wisconsin. He has been honored by the experimental performance company STREB with their Action Maverick Award and was recognized by Engineering News-Record as one of its Top 25 Newsmakers of 2024. He has also been credited as one of the 5 Greatest Architects Under 50 by HuffPost; the World’s Most Influential Young Architects by Wallpaper*; the 20 Most Influential Players in Design by Fast Company; the 20 Essential Young Architects by ICON magazine; and the Best & Brightest by Esquire.

Joshua is currently the John Portman Visiting Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and an AIA New York TORCH mentor. Committed to supporting architectural education, he has been the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at Yale University, the Cullinan Visiting Professor at Rice University, and a visiting professor at Columbia University, The Cooper Union, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Syracuse University, among others. An early member of the TED Advisory Board, Joshua has shared REX’s design methodologies at several TED conferences, and lectures frequently at universities, cultural institutions, and symposiums around the world.

Joshua holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard University, where he earned the inaugural Araldo Cossutta Fellowship and the SOM Fellowship, and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, magna cum laude with distinction in the major, from Yale University. He is NCARB-certified and a registered architect in states throughout the U.S. and Australia, and in the Netherlands.