Chris Perry
Associate Professor, Director, Geofutures, Associate Dean for Graduate Education
Chris Perry is Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Graduate Education at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s School of Architecture where he is also the director of the Master of Science in Architecture program at the Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology at Industry City in Brooklyn.
Prior to Rensselaer, Perry was the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Architecture, an endowed professorship, and prior to that appointment he held an endowed professorship at Rice University’s School of Architecture. He has also taught at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, the University of Toronto, the Architectural Association in London, RMIT in Melbourne, Pratt Institute, Barnard College, and Parsons School of Design.
He received a Master of Architecture from Columbia University, for which he also received an Honor Award for Excellence in Design, and a B.A. in philosophy from Colgate University. Prior to becoming a full-time faculty member at Rensselaer, Perry was a Presidential Fellow in MIT’s doctoral program in architectural history, theory and criticism.
Chris Perry is co-principal of pneumastudio, an experimental art, design and curatorial practice situated at the intersection of architecture and landscape. pneumastudio’s art and design work has been exhibited at the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Design Museum of Barcelona, and New York University. Publishers that have featured pneumastudio’s art and design work include Routledge, Actar, Prestel, and Wiley-Academy. pneumastudio was also featured in The New York Times as part of a 2015 exhibition review.
He is co-recipient of the Architectural League of New York’s Young Architects Award, co-editor of AD: Collective Intelligence in Design (Wiley-Academy), co-chair of ACADIA’s 2015 Annual Conference, as well as co-editor of its proceedings, and a former member of its Board of Directors.
He is a recipient of the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, for which he completed a joint residency with Cathryn Dwyre-Perry, with whom he is also co-editor of a special issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (MIT Press), co-curator of the exhibition Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural, and co-editor of a forthcoming book featuring work from the Ambiguous Territory exhibition and content from its affiliated symposium (Actar Publishers).
Perry’s previous design practice, servo, of which he was co-founder and co-principal for eleven years, was featured in group exhibitions at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Centre Pompidou, MoMA PS1, SFMoMA, Wexner Center for the Arts, Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Architectural League of New York, MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, and Artists Space in New York, as well as solo exhibitions at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, Cornell University, and UCLA. The group’s work is part of the permanent collections of SFMoMA and the FRAC Centre in Orleans, France and has been featured in a number of books by MIT Press, Princeton Architectural Press, Thames & Hudson, Rizzoli, and Phaidon, including a monograph edited by Perry and titled servo: networks and environments published by DAMDI. servo was a finalist in the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program and was selected for the “Design Vanguard” annual issue of Architectural Record, for which Perry was interviewed. Other magazines, journals and newspapers featuring the group’s work include Metropolis, Praxis, AD, a+u, Frame, Yale Perspecta, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times.