Sanford Kwinter

Sanford Kwinter 

Theory Session

Sanford Kwinter is Professor of Architectural Theory and Criticism at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is a writer and editor who holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

He has taught at MIT, Columbia and Rice universities as well as at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt, the Architectural Association in London, and the Universitat fur Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. He was cofounder and editor of the journal ZONE and Zone Books for 20 years. He has written widely on philosophical issues of design, architecture and urbanism, science and technology and was an editorial member of the ANY conferences and publications in the 1990s as well as of the journal Assemblage. He is the author of over a hundred and fifty articles in a dozen languages. His books include Architectures of Time: Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (MIT Press, 2001), Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture (Actar, 2008) and Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millennium and the forthcoming Soft Systems on the life sciences and and their impact on design. He writes frequently on the work of young and emerging practitioners in the nascent and transdisciplinary field of experimental spatial practice. He most recently curated a Harvard University-wide exhibition of art, design and the public domain entitled "The Divine Comedy." He is currently at work on a book on paleo-ecology and the origins of form.