Visiting Faculty
Douglas Graf
Charles Moore Visiting Professor Winter 2008
Douglas Graf will be both the Colin Clipson Visiting Fellow and the Charles Moore Visiting Professor during the winter semester. He received an A.B. in architecture and urban planning from Princeton and a M.Arch. from Harvard and currently teaches courses in design and architectural theory at the Knowlton School of Architecture at the Ohio State University. His teaching career has included the Kentucky, Washington, and Yale, as well as positions in Britain, Germany, and Finland, where he first went on a Fulbright to study the work of Alvar Aalto. He has received five teaching awards.
His interest in design theory has a primary focus on formal analysis, which is applied not only to architecture but also to urban form, landscape, photography, painting, product design, and graphics. One of his signature investigations has been into the structure and use of diagrams as tools for ‘close reading,’ beginning with an article in Perspecta. Many of his investigations have explored ‘metaphoric time’ as a central design strategy with essays on buildings as diverse as the Sancturary of Aesklepios, Ronchamp, Villa Mairea, and Vaux-le-Vicomte. He has also written about the idea of the ‘encyclopedic set’ as a persistent means of modeling complexity and the use of ‘fictive landscapes’ to derive narratives for the city.
He currently divides his time between Columbus (the one in Ohio) and London (not the one in Ohio), where he has been researching the design strategies in English gardens and the formal structure of the pre-industrial village. He is one of the principals in Mid-Ohio Design, a firm of architects and urban designers whose work elides from the real to the academic and who have won a number of urban design competitions.
