Rice Architecture is pleased to welcome nine new faculty members this fall. They include our newest assistant professors, Shantel Blakely and Maggie Tsang, as well as visiting faculty members: Luis Barajas (Lecturer), Bárbara Barreda (Visiting Scholar in Technology and Culture), Adam Frampton (Visiting Critic), Ali Karimi (Visiting Critic), İpek Mehmetoğlu (Lecturer), Falon Mihalic (Lecturer), and Nicola Springer (Visiting Critic).
“We are delighted to welcome so many new faculty members to M.D. Anderson Hall this year,” said Igor Marjanović, the William Ward Watkin Dean of Rice Architecture. “From their important work here in Houston to farther afield places such as Bahrain, Canada, Chile, Mexico, and beyond, they bring an unprecedented diversity of voices, backgrounds, and research interests to our school, linking the global and the local in the most powerful ways. We are grateful for their participation and we look forward to their contributions to the collective conversation of our faculty.”
The author of the upcoming book Marco Zanuso and a recipient of the 2022 Getty Research Fellowship, Shantel Blakely studies the links between philosophy and architecture (MIT Press, 2024). A registered architect from Houston who focuses on the nexuses of design, urbanism, and environment, Maggie Tsang won the Architectural League of New York’s 2022 Prize with her business Dept. Luis Barajas, a specialist in energy and building performance, is originally from Mexico. In Santiago, Chile, Barbara Barreda, an architect and the founder of BASE Studio, focuses on the study of complicated geometries and materials. Adam Frampton is the founder and principal of the Brooklyn-based firm Only If and is a skilled practicing architect. Ali Karimi, a co-founder of Civil Architecture in Bahrain, which focuses on working on the intersections of architecture, culture, and curatorship, joins Rice Architecture. Pek Mehmetolu, an architectural historian of global modernism, is joining us from Montreal. A landscape architect in Houston named Falon Mihalic has a passion for Gulf Coast plants and public art. Nicola Springer, a Rice Architecture alumna, is a prominent member of the Houston design scene and the director of Kirksey Architecture’s educational initiatives.
