ABOUT STAN ALLEN

Stan Allen, AIA, is a registered architect, principal of Stan Allen Architect and Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University. From 1989 – 2002, he taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he was also the Director of the Advanced Design Program. He was educated at Brown University (BA, 1978), The Cooper Union (B.Arch, 1981), and Princeton University (M.Arch, 1988).

After working for Richard Meier and Partners in New York and Rafael Moneo in Spain, he established his own practice in 1990. His built work to date includes galleries, gardens, workspaces and a number of innovative single-family houses. Current and recent projects include a 45,000 square-meter Contemporary Music Center in Taichung, Taiwan, buildings for the Botanical Garden of the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, and at Paju Book City, an urban wetland outside of Seoul Korea. A prototype weekend house in Sagaponac, New York is under construction. Parallel to this realized work, he has addressed questions of urbanism, infrastructure and public space through competition work and design research.

His architectural projects have been published in Points and Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (Princeton, 1999) and his theoretical essays in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (G+B Arts, 2000).

 Responding to the challenges of contemporary urban life and new technologies in creative ways, SAA has developed an extensive catalogue of architectural and urbanistic strategies, in particular looking at field theory, landscape architecture and ecology as models to revitalize the practices of architecture and urban design. This experimental work is in turn complemented by a series of smaller scale, realized projects that exhibit precision of detailing, formal restraint and spatial invention. In addition to design awards and competition prizes, he has been awarded Fellowships in Architecture from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1986 and 1990), The New York State Council on the Arts (1992), a Design Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991), and a Graham Foundation Grant (1993). In 1988 he was winner of the Young Architects Competition at the Architectural League of New York. In 1994 he was selected for the “Emerging Voices” series, and in 1995 for “40 Under 40.” In 2002 he was recognized with the President’s Citation for exceptional contributions to the Architecture Profession from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.