Frano Violich
As a Founding Principal at KVA Matx, Frano Violich has created an interdisciplinary design practice which engages material fabrication, digital technology and the conservation of natural resources to expand the public life of buildings and cities. Violich studied Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley and received his MArch from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. KVA has worked internationally, including the Soft House, a multi-unit “smart materials” housing project completed for the Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) in Hamburg, the Portable Light Project in Brazil, and currently the development of a rural home energy network in Victoria, Australia. KVA’s work in the US includes projects in the public realm, such as the 34th Street ferry terminal on Manhattan’s East River and RiverFirst in Minneapolis, and higher education including a new Law School for the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard’s Tozzer Anthropology Building, and the Institute for Data Science on the University of Rochester campus now under construction. KVA’s material research division Matx has developed designs and technology applications for Philips, Herman Miller, 3M, North Face and the US Department of Energy. The firm’s design work for the German-based Meister Consulting Group, now headquartered in Boston, has extended to include the digital fabrication and procurement of the company’s interior furnishings. The work of KVA has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, MoMA in New York, SFMOMA, and the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Violich has written for international journals, has lectured widely and taught at RISD, Berkeley, UVA, Michigan, and was Cornell’s Gensler Visiting Professor in Spring 2014.
George Thomas
Area Head, Critical Conservation MDes area group
George E. Thomas, Ph.D. is a cultural and architectural historian practicing with Susan Nigra Snyder, a registered architect in CivicVisions, based in Philadelphia. CivicVisions merges knowledge of a place’s history with the ability to see how this may be used to create a future that responds to contemporary lifestyle forces. Mr. Thomas has been a national pioneer in documentation for National Register Historic Districts and individual listings to secure historic tax credits for rehabilitation projects. For more than thirty years he has taught at the University of Pennsylvania where his courses seek to understand the interconnection between history and patterns of modern life. In 1978 he was one of the founders of Penn’s Program in Historic Preservation where he taught until 2002. In 1995 he was awarded the University’s Provost’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. Dr. Thomas has written and lectured widely on nineteenth and early twentieth century American architecture with a focus on the relationship between cultural innovation and architectural design. His research has broadened our understanding of the origins of modern design in the work of Pennsylvania architects serving industrial clients. His books include Cape May: Queen of the Seaside Resort; Drawing Toward Building: American Architectural Graphics 1732-1986; Frank Furness: The Complete Works; Building America’s First University: An Architectural and Historical Guide to the University of Pennsylvania; William L. Price: From Arts and Crafts to Modern Design; Buildings of the United States: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania and forthcoming, The Poetry of the Present: Architecture in the age of the great machines.
Susan Snyder
Area Head, Critical Conservation MDes area group
Susan Nigra Snyder is a registered architect practicing with George E. Thomas, Ph.D., a cultural and architectural historian in CivicVisions, based in Philadelphia. CivicVisions merges knowledge of a place’s history with the ability to see how this may be used to create a future that responds to contemporary lifestyle forces. CivicVisions has created a downtown Las Vegas Arts District, an economic/identity initiative for Pennsylvania’s colleges and communities, a Getty Grant exhibit about Haverford’s campus identity and projects for developers and institutions nationwide. Their “Learning from Las Vegas in the Media Age” was selected as one of the top 25 speakers at the AIA 2005 national convention. Ms. Snyder investigates how local identity is expressed, maintained and able to develop while being responsive to larger global and media forces that affect the realms of contemporary life. Her teaching for more than twenty five years at the University of Pennsylvania includes seminars and design studios that investigate the forces of consumption on urban form. Ms. Snyder’s research on contemporary systems seeks to understand the changing shape of urban retail/distribution and the relation between the automobile and contemporary community form. She has received two University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation grants to study processes of urban identity. Public service includes serving as chair of Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority’s Advisory Board of Design, a member of the Fine Arts Committee and of the Delaware Valley Smart Growth Alliance jury.
Jorge Silvetti
Jorge S. Silvetti is the Nelson Robinson, Jr. Professor of Architecture, Emeritus at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he has taught since 1975. He was chairman of the Architecture Department from 1995-2002. He has taught design studios (that have included The National Archives of Argentina, A Project Along the River Bilbao La Ria de Bilbao, La Reserva Ecologia of Buenos Aires, and Cordoba) and lectures on history, contemporary theory, and criticism (Architectural History I: Buildings, Texts, and Contexts from Antiquity through the 17th Century).
Since 1986, Silvetti has directed a number of research programs, including one on the urbanism and architecture of Sicily, which won a Progressive Architecture award and made him the first designer to win in all P/A award categories. Other research programs include “Buenos Aires 2000,” on the future of public spaces in the changing Latin American metropolis, and “The ria de Bilbao,” on the future development of this formerly industrial city in northern Spain. Silvetti has written on architectural theory, and his design work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. In 1986, he was awarded the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome. Since 1996, he has served as a juror for the Pritzker Architectural Prize, and in 2000 he became a juror for the Mies van der Rohe Prize for Latin American Architecture. Silvetti received the Dipl Arch from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the MArch from the University of California at Berkeley.
His architecture firm, Machado and Silvetti , was founded in 1974 and has received numerous honors for design projects, including three awards from the American Institute of Architects, nine Progressive Architecture awards and citations, seven Boston Society of Architects awards, and eight design awards from the New England AIA chapter. In 1991, the firm was given the First Award in Architecture by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The firm’s notable projects include work at Princeton University, Harvard University, Rice University, Arizona State University, the University of Arkansas, the University of Utah, the American University of Beirut, as well as a public library branch in Boston, a private development in Boston, and a new center of comparative archaeology at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California.
Peter Rowe
On leave for Spring 2026
Peter Rowe is the Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. Rowe served as Dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design from 1992 to 2004, Chairman of the Urban Planning and Design Department from 1988 until 1992, and Director of the Urban Design Programs from 1985 until 1990. Prior to Harvard, Rowe served as the Director of the School of Architecture at Rice University from 1981 to 1985 and also directed many multi-disciplinary research projects through the Rice Center, where he was Vice President from 1978 onwards, and at the Southwest Center for Urban Research.
Rowe’s research and consulting are extensive, diverse, and international in scope, including subjects dealing with matters of cultural interpretation and design, as well as the relationship of urban form to issues of economic development, historic conservation, housing provision and resource sustainability. He has served as a principal investigator on projects sponsored by a wide range of U.S. government agencies, and has served as an advisor to a number of cities on matters of urban design and planning including Beijing, Guiyang, Guangzhou, Kunming, Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuhan and Wenzhou in China; Incheon in South Korea and Barcelona in Spain. He was also a board member of several prominent cultural and academic institutions, like the Center for Canadian Architecture and the Cities Programme of the London School of Economics, as well as on the board of several companies involved in low-cost housing provision and the use of environmentally sustainable technologies.
A recognized critic and lecturer in the field of architecture and urban design, in addition to numerous articles, Rowe is the author, co-author, or editor of thirty-one books: Principles for Local Environmental Management (1978); Urban Watershed Management: Flooding and Water Quality (1979); Design Thinking (1987); Making a Middle Landscape (1991); Modernity and Housing (1993); Civic Realism (1997); Projecting Beirut (1998); L’Asia e il Moderno (1999); Modern Urban Housing in China: 1840-2000 (2001); Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China (2002) Shanghai: Architecture and Urbanism for Modern China (2004); East-Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City (2005); Building Barcelona: The Second Renaixença (2006); A City and Its Stream: The Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project (2010); Emergent Architectural Territories in East Asian Cities (2011); Methodological Notes on the Spatial Analysis of Urban Formation (2013); Urban Intensities Contemporary Housing Types and Territories (2014); Clear Light: The Architecture of Lauretta Vinciarelli (2014); China’s Urban Communities: Concepts, Contexts and Well-Being (2016); The Mumbai Metropolitan Region and Palava City (2017); Design Thinking in the Digital Age (2017); When Urbanization Comes to Ground (2019); A City in Blue and Green: The Singapore Story (2019), Urban Blocks and Grids: A Brief History, Technical Features and Outcomes (2019); Rio Ciudad, Monterrey: Space Production, Ecology and Culture (2019); Korean Modern: The Matter of Identity (2021); An Early Modern View: Cartography and Qianlong’s Plan of Beijing (2021); Chinese Modern: Episodes Backwards and Forwards in Time (2022); Southeast Asian Modern: From Roots to Contemporary Turns (2022); Design Thinking and Storytelling in Architecture (2024); The Metabolism of Settlement Coexistences (2024); and Space, Time and Circumstances (2026).
Nicholas Nelson
Nick has over 18 years of experience as a fluvial geomorphologist and river restoration practitioner. Nick is the northeast regional director for Inter-Fluve, a river and wetland restoration firm working on projects throughout the country and internationally. His work with Inter-Fluve has focused on dam removal and channel restoration/rehabilitation planning and design, urban river restoration and renewal, the restoration of retired cranberry bogs to native stream and wetland ecosystems, geomorphic and habitat assessments, construction observation, and GIS analyses. At the GSD since 2016, Nick attempts to connect hydrologic and ecologic concepts with the typical landscape architecture background through actual designed and constructed examples and field excursions. Nick was an instructor at the CAUP International Design Summer School held at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, in 2017. Nick taught Applications of GIS in River Restoration at the University of Minnesota biennially between 2007 and 2014 and Environmental Planning at Northeastern University annually since 2014. He taught fluvial geomorphology to MA conservation commissioners at the annual conferences since 2012 and is currently on a task force to aid in developing geomorphic and stability assessment protocols for MA rivers.
Mark Mulligan
Mark Mulligan is Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture. From 2011 to 2014, he served as Program Director for the GSD’s Master in Architecture Degree. In academic year 2014-15 he led the Loeb Fellowship Program as Interim Curator. He is a registered architect in Massachusetts and has completed projects in the Boston area, Hawaii, Costa Rica, and Japan. Prior to establishing his own Cambridge-based practice in 1998, Mulligan worked as project architect for Fumihiko Maki’s Pritzker Prize-winning practice in Tokyo. In 2008 he edited a book of Maki’s essays entitled Nurturing Dreams: Collected Essays on Architecture and the City. Mulligan has published numerous essays about modern and contemporary Japanese architecture as well as translating Japanese authors into English.
Mulligan’s research explores the relationship between constructive detail and meaning in architecture; he has taught a variety of studios and courses at the GSD since 1996, including a course on modern Japanese architecture, introductory and advanced courses on construction technology, architecture and urban design studios. Since 2010, he has led teams of students in producing digital reconstructions and CG animations of major landmarks of 20th century Japanese architecture, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (built 1923, demolished 1967), Kenzo Tange’s 1964 National Olympic Stadium at Yoyogi, and (currently in progress) Junzo Sakakura’s Japan Pavilion for the 1937 Paris World Expo. In winter 2014, he collaborated with FAS Professor Yukio Lippit to organize the exhibition “The Thinking Hand: Tools and Traditions of the Japanese Carpenter” at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.
Mulligan received his BA from Yale University and his MArch with distinction from the GSD.
Rahul Mehrotra
Rahul Mehrotra is the founder principal of RMA Architects . He divides his time between working in Mumbai and Boston and teaching at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University where he is Professor of Urban Design and Planning and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization.
His Mumbai-based firm, RMA Architects, was founded in 1990 and has designed and executed projects including government and private institutions, corporate workplaces, private homes, and unsolicited projects driven by the firm’s commitment to advocacy in the city of Mumbai. The firm has designed a software campus for Hewlett Packard in Bangalore, a campus for Magic Bus (an NGO that works with poor children), led the restoration of the Chowmahalla Palace in Hyderabad, and formulated a conservation master plan for the Taj Mahal with the Taj Mahal Conservation Collaborative. The firm also recently designed and built a social housing project for 100 elephants and their caretakers in Jaipur as well as a corporate office in Hyderabad. The firm has designed several single-family houses in different parts of India and one in Karachi, Pakistan. In 2015 RMA Architects completed the Lab of the Future on the Novartis Campus in Basel, Switzerland and were finalist in an international design competition for the Museum of Modern Art in Sydney. The recent projects of the firm include a Library for the School of Architecture at CEPT , the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University and a School of Public Policy at the IIM Ahmedabad. In 2018 RMA Architects were awarded the Venice Biennale juror’s ‘Special Mention ’ for ‘three projects that address issues of Intimacy and empathy, gently diffusing social boundaries and hierarchies’.
Mehrotra has written and lectured extensively on issues to do with architecture, conservation, and urban planning and design in Mumbai and India. His writings include coauthoring Bombay: The Cities Within, which covers the city’s urban history from the 1600s to 1990; Banganga: Sacred Tank; Public Places Bombay; Anchoring a City Line, A history of the city’s commuter railway; and Bombay to Mumbai: Changing Perspectives. He has also coauthored Conserving an Image Center: The Fort Precinct in Bombay. Based on this study and its recommendations, the historic Fort District in Mumbai was declared a conservation precinct in 1995 – a first such designation in India. In 2000, he edited a book for the Union of International Architects, which earmarks the end of the last century and is titled The Architecture of the 20th Century in the South Asian Region. In 2011, Mehrotra wrote Architecture in India – Since 1990, which is a reading of contemporary architecture in India which was extended through an exhibition he co-curated titled The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India, at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai in Jan 2016. This was followed in 2018 by a second co curated exhibition titled: The State of Housing: Realities, Aspirations and imaginaries in India which showed between Jan and March 2018 and is currently travelling in India. Since 2014 Mehrotra has been a member of the CICA – the International Committee of Architecture Critics.
Mehrotra is a member of the steering committee of the Laxmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard. In 2012-2015, he led a Harvard University-wide research project with Professor Diana Eck, called The Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Mega City. This work was published as a book in 2014. This research was extended in 2017 in the form of a book titled Does Permanence Matter? This research was also extended into an invited exhibition at the 2016 Venice Biennale. Mehrotra co – authored a book titled Taj Mahal: Multiple Narratives which was published in Dec 2017. Mehrotra’s most recent books are titled Working in Mumbai (2020) and The Kinetic City and other essays (2021). The former a reflection on his practice evolved through its association with the city of Bombay/Mumbai. The second book presents Mehrotra’s writings over the last thirty years and illustrates his long-term engagement with and analysis of urbanism in India. This work has given rise to a new conceptualization of the city which Mehrotra calls the Kinetic City.
Remment Koolhaas
Rem Koolhaas, Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design, founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in 1975 together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp. Having worked as a journalist and script writer before becoming an architect, Koolhaas graduated from the Architectural Association in London, and in 1978, published Delirious New York, a Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. In 1995, his book S,M,L,XL summarized the work of OMA and established connections between contemporary society and architecture. At this moment Rem Koolhaas is heading the work of OMA as well as AMO – the conceptual branch of OMA, a think tank focused on social, economic, and technological issues.
At Harvard, Rem Koolhaas conducts the Project on the City, a research program investigating changing urban conditions around the world. The projects include a study on China’s Pearl River Delta (published as Great Leap Forward), an analysis of the role of retail and consumption in the contemporary society (The Harvard Guide to Shopping), and studies on Rome, Lagos, Moscow and Beijing.
Recently, OMA has completed the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin, a campus center at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, the Prada Epicenter in Los Angeles and the Public Library in Seattle. The Seattle Library was chosen by TIME magazine as The Best Architecture for 2004 and was described by the New York Times as “a blazing chandelier to swing your dreams upon. If an American city can erect a civic project as brave as this one, the sun hasn’t set on the West.” (May 16, 2004)
In April 2005, the Casa da Musica concert hall in Porto was completed and was already voted as one of the most important concert halls in the world by the New York Times (April 10th 2005). In Asia, work has begun on CCTV — a 575,000m2 headquarters, studio, and cultural center for China’s national broadcaster, China Central Television, in Beijing. CCTV is OMA’s largest building to date, and is to be completed by 2008, in time for the Beijing Olympic Games.
Recent AMO projects include a study for the European Commission on the visual identity of the EU, image restructuring for Condé Nast magazines Lucky and Wired, a study on the future of the automobile for Volkswagen, and a study concerning preservation for the city of Beijing. By combining AMO and OMA Rem Koolhaas is seen as one of the most important thinkers of the last decades. Nicolai Ouroussoff, critic for Los Angeles Times, underlines this by: “There is little question that Rem Koolhaas is one of the most influential architects of the last 20 years. As an architectural thinker, his cool analytic approach to design, sprinkled with a healthy skepticism, has informed the profession that his fingerprints can be found on the work of almost any young architect today. Koolhaas has achieved the enviable stature of both cult idol and international celebrity.” (May 21, 2004)
The work of Rem Koolhaas and OMA has been celebrated as well by several international awards, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize (2000) and the RIBA Gold Medal (2004). In 2005, Rem Koolhaas received the Mies van der Rohe Award for the Netherlands Embassy, Berlin. This award is presented every two years by the European Union and the Fundaci Mies van der Rohe (Barcelona) to acknowledge and reward quality architectural production in Europe. The jury singled out OMA’s design of the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin for the extraordinary relationship established with its surroundings. In making their decision to award the Netherlands Embassy, the jury commended the “quality of the urban reflection and intelligence of the concept implemented, especially as regards the unprecedented concept of ‘trajectory’ and the new potential it brings to this project of great complexity.”
Koolhaas’ work was the subject of an overview exhibition, Content, which opened at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin in 2003, and at the Kunsthal (built by OMA) in 2004. In conjunction with the exhibition, a book of the same name was published in 2003 by Taschen Books. Content illustrates the ways that Rem Koolhaas and OMA-AMO interact with the world and how the world in turn influences their work. An exhibition by AMO on representation in and the perception of Europe was on display last Fall in Brussels and at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. In Summer 2005, Rem Koolhaas curated one of the exhibitions titled Expansion & Neglect for the prestigious Biennale in Venice.
See projects at oma.eu
Rem Koolhaas recipient of the 15th Praemium Imperiale
Remment Koolhaas named the Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate
Jerold S. Kayden
Jerold S. Kayden is the Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Founding Director of the Master in Real Estate Program. He previously served as co-chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and director of the Urban Planning Program. His teaching and scholarship address issues of land use and environmental law, public and private development in cities, public space, urban disasters and climate change, and design competitions. His books include Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience; Urban Disaster Resilience: New Dimensions from International Practice in the Built Environment; Landmark Justice: The Influence of William J. Brennan on America’s Communities; and Zoning and the American Dream: Promises Still To Keep.
As an urban planner and lawyer, Professor Kayden has advised governments, non-governmental organizations, and private and public real estate developers in the United States and around the world. He has argued court cases, authored or co-authored amicus briefs in United States Supreme Court cases, and served as expert witness. He has drafted zoning laws for various U. S. cities on inclusionary housing and privately owned public spaces. On international work, he has consulted widely for such institutions as the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the United States Agency for International Development, and the United Nations Development Programme, working principally in Armenia, China, Nepal, Russia, and Ukraine on drafting and implementing land use, real estate, and housing laws. Since 1991, he has served as principal constitutional counsel to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, D.C. He leads Advocates for Privately Owned Public Space, a non-profit organization he founded based in New York City. From 2009 to 2011, he was Principal Investigator for the Harvard-Netherlands Project on Climate Change, Water, Land Development, and Adaptation, a collaborative project between Harvard, the Dutch Government, and the Deltares Institute.
Among Professor Kayden’s honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and awards from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, the American Bar Association, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and the Environmental Design Research Association. At the Design School, he was recognized schoolwide as “Teacher of the Year.” Professor Kayden earned his undergraduate, law, and city and regional planning degrees from Harvard and subsequently was law clerk to Judge James L. Oakes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University was established in 1957 from a bequest from Frank Backus Williams, a prominent New York City lawyer who played a significant role in creating the 1916 New York City zoning resolution, the first comprehensive zoning law in the United States. Among many publications, he wrote The Law of City Planning and Zoning (Macmillan, 1922) and co-wrote Model Laws for Planning Cities, Counties, and States (Harvard University Press, 1935). Professor Kayden is the sixth holder of the chair. Previous holders include Martin Meyerson (1957), followed by Charles Abrams, Fernando Belaunde Terry, Brian Berry, and William Doebele.