Michael Benedikt holds the Hal Box Chair in Urbanism and is the Director of The Center for American Architecture and Design at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught design studio and design theory since 1975. He is a graduate of The University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and of Yale University. He has practiced architecture both in medium-sized firms and on his own, with a number of buildings to his credit in Austin. His books include For an Architecture of Reality (Lumen Books, 1987), Deconstructing the Kimbell (Lumen Books, 1991), Cyberspace: First Steps (MIT Press, 1991, translated into three languages) Value and Value 2 (Center for American Architecture and Design, 1997, 1998), and Shelter: The 2000 Raoul Wallenberg Lecture (Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, 2001). He is also executive editor of the book-series CENTER: Architecture and Design in America. He has been a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, a Scholar in Residence at the Rockefeller Foundation's Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, Colin Clipson Fellow at the University of Michigan, and J. L Constant Professor at the University of Kansas. He has published over 100 articles and has delivered over 85 invited lectures in the U.S. and abroad on architectural practice, design theory and research, computing, art, and ethics. In 2003, he was awarded the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture’s Teacher of Year Award, and in 2004 was named a Distinguished Professor by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). His latest writing explores themes in theology and the theory of evolution as it relates to the (human) act of design.