Michael Bell comes to Taubman College as the Fall 2008 Eliel Saarinen Visiting Professor

Michael Bell is an architect practicing in New York and an associate professor of architecture at Columbia University where he is also director of the core design studios and coordinator of the school’s housing design studios. Bell is also director of the Columbia Project on Housing and teaches a planning course on the development, design, and financing of public and affordable housing. He has taught and lectured at Rice University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. He is the author of a monograph on Stanley Saitowitz; the editor of 16 Houses: Designing the Public’s Private HouseSlow SpaceEngineered Transparency: Glass in Architecture and Structural Engineering, available in October 2008. His firm, Michael Bell Architecture, was established in 1989 and specializes in housing and urban redevelopment where housing is a key component. In 2001 Bell led a team of architects who provided research, planning, and design for 1800 units of housing on a 100-acre parcel of oceanfront land owned by the New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development (NYHPD). The project was commissioned by the Architectural League of New York and the NYHPD as a research proposal. Bell also founded 16 Houses, a housing research and design program in Houston, for the Fifth Ward Redevelopment Corporation. Projects by Bell have received four Progressive Architecture design awards and citations, and have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Yale School of Architecture, the Architectural League of New York, The University Art Museum at Berkeley, and at Archi-Lab. His recently completed Binocular House is featured in the January 2008 Metropolis magazine and will appear with criticism by Joan Ockman in Casabella and the new edition of Kenneth Frampton’s American Masterworks Houses. Currently, Michael Bell and his partner Eunjeong Seong are working with the Bridgeport Housing Authority in Connecticut on master planning and new energy efficient public housing redevelopment.