Michael Dennis

Michael Dennis has been both an academic and a practicing professional for over forty years. He is an authority on urban design and the development and form of the American campus. The firm’s work has been directly influenced by his extensive experience in teaching and research. This interrelationship between theory and practice informs the firm’s process, approach, and beliefs.

Michael has been in private practice in Boston since 1981, and prior to that in Ithaca, New York since 1970. Since 1992 he has been Professor of Architecture at MIT, where he teaches Urban Design and Theory and is the Director of the post-professional program in Architecture and Urbanism. He has previously taught at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Kentucky, Princeton, and Rice University. He was the 1986 Thomas Jefferson Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia, the 1988 Eero Saarinen Professor of Architecture at Yale University, and the 2006 Charles Moore Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan.

Michael has lectured widely, and is the author of Court and Garden: From the French Hôtel to the City of Modern Architecture (MIT Press, 1986), a study of the evolution of the modern conception of space, exemplified by the parallel transformations of the French urban residential building type and of French urban design strategies, as the pre-modern predominance of the public realm was supplanted by the modern predominance of the private realm. Michael is currently working on another publication, Temples and Towns: A Study of the Form, Elements, and Principles of Planned Towns, expected to be released in 2015. In 2011 Michael was awarded the prestigious CNU Athena Medal for his contributions to urbanism.